Prior to visiting India, I happened to "StumbleUpon" Bill Gate's speech at TED regarding Malaria. In the speech, he lays out the economic challenge of solving health problems such as Malaria. The problem with a disease like Malaria is that it has been eradicated from rich countries - but not in poor countries. It's a problem because the economies that still have the disease don't provide sufficient economic incentive for the pharmaceutical companies to invest in a cure.
When I was in India, I "stumbled upon" a potentially innovative solution to this problem. India has a problem with Tuberculosis. Unlike Malaria, TB needs medicine not just bed nets, as is the case with Malaria. But the cost of TB drug development is high and the economic return low.
A solution? Apply open source techniques and technologies that are used in open source software development to the drug discovery process. The "Open Source Drug Discovery" initiative was launched and funded by the Indian government to the tune of $35 Million. Sun is a sponsor of this initiative and I'm proud to see our employees engaged in work that not only improves the lives of people through the use of technology, but helps expand the lifespan of people as well.
Check out www.osdd.net. Join. Figure out how open source approaches can solve other big problems facing us.
On a related note, the TDI kernel for an open source drug discovery project in tropical diseases has recently been published (see our papers in PLoS NTD [ http://www.plosntds.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pntd.0000418 ] and Nature Biotech [ http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v27/n4/full/nbt0409-320.html ]. This work is part of our efforts within the Tropical Disease Initiative ( http://www.tropicaldisease.org ).
TDI believes that open source drug discovery is a promising alternative avenue to conventional patent-based drug development in tropical diseases. In the attached papers we have introduced the results from a newly assembled computational pipeline for identifying protein targets for drug discovery in ten organisms that cause tropical diseases. We hope that the resulting kernel will provide a base of drug targets and lead candidates around which an open source community can nucleate.
We encourage other people to donate their judgment and, whenever possible, in silico and in vitro experiments to develop these targets to the point where drug optimization can begin.
I really believe that open source will allow for a fast track in delivering drugs to those that most need them.
Best!
Marc A. Marti-Renom
Posted by Marc A. Marti-Renom on April 21, 2009 at 05:03 AM PDT #