CDRI Leads Open Source Drug Development for Malaria

The Central Drug Research Institute will lead the OSDD for malaria in India. The CDRI is celebrating its 60th anniversary.

Open Source Drug Development

Taking a cue from open source models pioneered ininformation technology (web technology and Linuxoperating system) and in biotechnology, (human Genome Sequencing), and applying it to discovery of new drugs, CDRI has launched Open Source Drug Development for tropical disease.

OSDD is a group of institutes under the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). It partners with international institutes. Its vision is to provide affordable healthcare solutions, especially the discovery of those drugs which multinational companies are not interested in.

It's efforts go into eradicating tropical diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, leshaniasis etc. These diseases don’t register with the top pharmaceuticals companies.

OSDD pools scientists from various branches of sciences so that they can work in a collaborative and multi-disciplinary way. Scientists, doctors, technocrats, students, and other experts work together towards a common cause.

OSDD research on tropical diseases

The Open Source Drug Discovery for tuberculosis started two years ago, and the project has more than 700 scientists from all over the country working on it.

Diseases like tuberculosis and malaria do not bring in multinational drug development companies because the market for those drugs is small (in case of TB, the market is around three hundred million dollars) while the cost of developing a new drug is around 2 billion dollars.

CDRI director Tushar Kanti Chakraborty, said, “OSDD was created by the CSIR, which brings together all its labs as well as other experts and interested students to further the research on a tropical disease.”

CDRI already has molecules for malaria and so it has taken initiative to develop a malaria drug.

The meeting of the malaria OSDD will take place in the first week of April, Mr. Chakroborty said.