Open Lab

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is highly dependent on large corporations and are solely driven by the profit motive. Open source research is inexpensive, shared, and creates alternatives to monopolistic proprietary patents. It gives people access to the tools they need to innovate for themselves, says Utkarsh Palnitkar, industry leader— health sciences, Ernst & Young. If scientists worldwide support a collective research effort, new innovations would crop up and existing ones fine-tuned, just as programmers everywhere are constantly sending fixes and upgrades to Linux and other open-source software programs, he adds.

Jaijit Bhattacharya, country director (government strategy), Sun Microsystems India, says, “We see that most of the efforts on drug discovery are towards lifestyle diseases, rather than the far deadlier tropical diseases. We feel that OSDD is an extremely brilliant concept that can help in marshaling the collective energies of young scientists for drug discovery for the devastating tropical diseases such as TB, Chikungunya, malaria, Kala-azar etc.”

He suggests a revenue model too. Creating an internet- based open source of information to be utilised by the drug companies at a nominal license fee in order to produce affordable drugs for neglected diseases of the poor, says Bhattacharya. Open source drug discovery would have independent biologists freely sharing their work through the internet.

All discoveries would remain in the public domain, and final stages of drug development would be conducted by whatever company offered the lowest bid. Since the key information related to the drug’s action would not be patented, generic competitors could immediately enter the market, keeping the drug prices low.