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Monday , March 03, 2008 at 0150 hrs If you thought the adoption of open source was restricted to only software—web servers, code development, and operating systems— then think again. The open source wave could soon power drug discovery initiatives in the country. A decentralised, web-based initiative is emerging that would enable scientists from laboratories, universities, institutes, and drug companies to work together in discovering new drugs for diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, various types of cancer, AIDS, Chikungunya, Kala-azar, dengue fever, etc. Not only would drugs be made available to the public at affordable prices, there are monetary gains for the participating researchers in the form of awards and prizes.

Globally, the ‘Human Genome Sequencing Initiative’ is seen as a significant project that worked on the open source model. It worked on the success of Linux, which enabled a free flow of information between researchers. There is also the ‘Tropical Disease Initiative’ (TDI) of the University of California, San Francisco. By means of an open source research and development model, it will look for treatments for dengue, sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis. TDI seeks to unite the attempts of hundreds of volunteer researchers from around the world, centering on the purpose of computational biology and chemistry on drug innovation. Discoveries resulting from this research would not be patented; instead, they would be made available to so-called ‘virtual pharma.’ However, TDI has not yet finalised the details of its intellectual property model.

Closer home, the trigger for this new form of drug discovery has been initiated by a Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)-led ‘Insilico biology consortium’, involving leading institutes such as Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Institute of Microbial Technology (IMT), Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), National Institute of Immunology (NII), Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute (VPCI), Delhi University. They will later be joined by institutes such as Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Indian Institute of Science and others. Armed with a sizeable grant from the government, CSIR is finalising the broad contours of the project titled ‘Open Source Drug Discovery’ (OSDD).