Multi-dimensions of Healthcare

I am indeed delighted to participate in the inauguration of International Conference on Equity and Access to Medicine organized by Research and Information System (RIS) at New Delhi...I would like to talk on the topic “Multi-dimensions of Healthcare”.

...In the international presence of experts in the field of medicine, I thought of sharing Indian experience aiming bringing down the cost of new drugs, particularly TB and Malaria. This experience of India relates to healthcare domain through Open Source movement based on the new and innovative approach in soliciting the contribution from the young minds across the world.

The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) programme is a CSIR led team India consortium with global partnerships, with a vision to provide affordable healthcare to the developing world.

Market forces discourage research- based pharmaceutical companies from developing drugs for infectious diseases like Tuberculosis (TB), Malaria, and Leishmaniasis (Kala Azar) that predominantly affect the developing world. Without a market attractive to global pharmaceutical industry, it would be naïve to expect drug discovery for infectious diseases to become a lucrative standard business model. In the wake of the failure of market forces we need to explore new models of drug discovery. This is where OSDD offers a promising new model.

OSDD has chosen TB as the first target disease. The current TB therapy was developed in the 1960’s. The therapy is a combination of four drugs which has to be administered under observation of the physician for six to eight months. In India, an estimated 370,000 deaths due to TB occur each year. This amounts to over 1,000 deaths a day, or 2 TB deaths every 3 minutes. This disease which affects mostly our poor is a huge problem for the nation. OSDD aims to discover better and more effective drugs for TB by involving large number of researchers based on the open source philosophy that more eye balls make all bugs shallow.

The Open Source approach has been successfully adopted in software and collaborative approach is known in science. OSDD’s effort to do discovery in the open with the aim of collaborate, share, discover makes it highly participative. It enables manifold expansion of resources for research.