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: on non-toxic targets. National JALMA Institute of Leprosy and other Mycobacterial Diseases of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is providing authentic strains of Mycobacterium to the researchers for experiments. Institute of Life Sciences, a public private partnership promoted by Dr Reddy’s, University of Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh government, has joined OSDD to participate in drug discovery. The institute has expertise in cloning, expression, and assay development, organic synthesis of small molecules, functional chemical library management and screening.

There has been international participation too. An example is Cambia of Australia whose CEO Richard Jefferson is a well known expert in the field of open approach in patents and innovation. Cambia has agreed to plot the patent landscape of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB), which is a collaborative set up of Johns Hopkins University has also joined OSDD as a partner. IOB scientists create the largest community resource of experimental data in human proteins. It is a portal for sharing and integration of human protein data. They are now bringing these competencies to the OSDD project.

“As on December 30 last year, OSDD had 512 registered participants from reputed institutions like Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University etc in the US and many reputed institutions in India. Internally, we had set a target of at least 500 registrations by year-end, which has been reached,” informs Thomas.

“OSDD has made tremendous progress in a short period of one year. It has not only established the technology architecture, but has also created a community of open source drug discovery scientists who are now actively posting drug related problems and are putting the progress made on those problems in the open source,” says Jaijit Bhattacharya, director—government strategy, Sun Microsystems India. He adds: “This is snowballing into a participatory drug discovery process of massive proportions. OSDD has already contacted many biotech and pharma firms. AstraZeneca and Biocon are already actively involved. As the initiative becomes even bigger, more firms are expected to join in.”

Scientists agree that mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) is a complex mycobacterium. It has evaded drug discovery despite enormous scientific progress in the last 50 years. What is required is a holistic approach to understand the biology of infection to design better drugs. The complexity of this task and past experience, points to the dire need for the best minds to collaborate and share in an open environment.