CSIR planning to develop cheap drug for malaria

Buoyed by the rapid progress in trying to develop an affordable drug for tuberculosis (TB) through the open source platform, the country's premier science research organisation now plans to replicate the model for malaria. Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow, will power the initiative.

Fifty laboratories across the country are working on the TB project. In an open source project, different laborataries work on different parts of it and then upload their findings on the worldwide web. The data can be accessed as long as the users give due credit to the researchers.

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had launched its open source drug discovery (OSDD) initiative in 2008 to provide affordable healthcare. The basic concept behind the drive was to start research on drugs for tropical diseases, which, usually, draw limited attention of multi-national pharmaceutical companies.