Is the Future of Pharma Open Source?

What do you do when the profitable market for a drug is small, but the medical need is huge?

You open source it.

The current patent-based drug development process doesn't help the developing world much. Take for example, tuberculosis, recently called an "orphan giant" in an editorial in Nature. TB has a particularly high incidence of mortality in India and other parts of the developing world. The drugs that are currently used to treat TB though were developed back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and it’s unlikely that the pharmaceutical industry will invest money into the clinical trials even if they do have promising leads.

Malaria has also long been considered one of the world's biggest orphan diseases, killing millions without generating much enthusiasm within pharma. And that's because diseases like malaria and tuberculosis afflict mainly poor populations, and so the drugs to treat them don't hold the promise for a big payoff.

The current approach to drug development takes too long, costs too much, and is too unpredictable for pharma to invest in small to non-existent commercial markets. So for diseases like these, open source drug development has become one of the most promising avenues and we're finding more who seem to agree.