Open Source Drug Discovery: And now the target is malaria and its resistance to drugs

Hyderabad: College and university students can now contribute their ideas to find a viable medical solution to the ever-increasing problem of malaria and its resistance to drugs. Even ordinary citizens can participate in the new initiative launched by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to combat malaria through search for new drugs.

The CSIR has taken up malaria research under open domain after achieving considerable success in its fight against tuberculosis and development of new molecules to treat multi-drug resistant TB. Incidentally, non-biologists contributed a lot to the sequencing of the TB bacterial genome. Malaria is the second neglected disease in the country to be thrown open to the general public besides scientists for research on anti-malarial drugs...