Open Source in Drug Discovery

The title of this post is pretty unusual. Just as you are pleasantly surprised even I was pleasantly surprised after knowing of such an initiative through this report. Leading the research in drug discovery are corporate giants who are more interested in developing vaccines or drugs for curing a select set of diseases and in the process they churn out high margin drugs. So this CSIR led initiative is a whiff of fresh air. I am not an expert on patenting and those in pharmaceutical industry would know better if this model will work or not but going by success of Mozilla, Linux and Wikipedia in the areas of open source software and crowd sourcing, I believe with some effort on legal and patent issues this initiative can be made successful.

The scientists at the OSDD have started with neglected diseases like TB and malaria and they say that despite deaths of 1.7 mn people throughout world due to TB there has been no new drug discovery in last 4-5 decades. That just goes on to show how much we can bank on current state of drug development. The CSIR chief Samir Bramhachari is pretty hopeful of this initiative's success and that is important. When Richard Stallman started free software movement it had many doubters but it has contributed to a large extent in present success of open source softwares. And if OSDD succeeds, it will have much bigger impact and on a much larger population.