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Open Source Drug Discovery


Open Source Drug Discovery is a Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India (CSIR)-led Team India Consortium with global participation. offering a collaborative drug discovery platform for neglected tropical diseases like leishmaniasis, which draw limited attention of research, based pharmaceutical enterprises. This program has a global community with over 7500 participants from 130 countries comprising researchers, academia, students, industries, educational institutions and so on. Anyone who is committed to the discovery of drugs for neglected diseases in an open source mode can participate in the program. OSDD functions by bringing together experts from diverse backgrounds to focus on discovering and developing affordable drugs for tropical infections.

CSIR-OSDD was launched in September 2008. This project was conceived by Prof Samir K. Brahmachari, the Founder Director of CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology as an 11th Five year plan project of CSIR. This was approved by the Government of India with an overall outlay of Rs 45.96 crores (about $12 million). The project motto is “Affordable healthcare for all” and makes use of open source philosophy, crowd –sourcing concepts and a collaborative research model, capitalizing on web based tools to fuel innovation and discover novel therapies. All the data and resources generated by the community are openly shared through a web based portal called Sysborg 2.0 specifically designed for this purpose

The project has a healthcare model that blends together the policies of patenting and open source research, aiming to make novel drugs available as generic drugs, without Intellectual Property restrictions, and thus ensure affordability and accessibility.

The first action involved development of drugs for tuberculosis (TB) bacillus (Mycobacterium tuberculosis). The project has two phases:

OSDD started with the set up of a web portal, which is based on the model of website so that participating agencies can easily contribute to or modify the content of the website. The information uploaded can be then peer-reviewed. New drugs being developed will be in public domain. The generic drugs will be taken up by pharmaceutical companies so that the drug will be commercialised at reasonable price.


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