India's Open Source Drug Discovery Program Faces Lack Of Funding

India's Open Source Drug Discovery Program, or OSDD, ran out of funding last week, as the ministry of science and technology did not clear the cabinet note to extend the project's funding on time. OSDD was created in 2008 in an effort to develop new drugs to treat neglected diseases, including Tuberculosis, Malaria, and Leishmaniasis.

In particular, OSDD has been working to develop a new combination of drugs for the treatment of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (DR TB), which experts believe kills 1,000 people in India every day. According to the Times of India, no new drugs for the treatment of TB have been developed since the 1960s. The OSDD has been hard at work developing a new drug combination that could cut down on the number of treatments DR TB patients have to take. Currently, patients have to take six drugs. However, the new drug combination could reduce that number of drugs to three and reduce the period of treatment from two years to 4-6 months...