Here is the Tim Berner Lee of medicine. He is right here in India and is the latest hero of science students and drug researchers across the world. Samir Brahmachari, director-general of the Centre for Science and Industrial Research and founder and mentor of the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) programme initiated by India, dreams about making drugs for poor man’s diseases. He also dreams of making these drugs available to the poor, just as Tim Berner Lee, with his larger-than-large heart, made world wide web freely available to the world at no cost.
Brahmachari aims to build a platform that can be shared with drug companies, researchers, students and anyone who can collaborate in any stage of discovering a drug for tuberculosis, a disease which strikes the poorest and for which no big company is making better drugs.
OSDD has already got its first ‘hit’. For the first time in the world, it has identified through open source a molecule that has properties that go against the targeted organism, in this case the tuberculosis mycobacterium. OSDD has handed over the molecule to a partner drug company which is taking it to the next stage.
The drug company gets a cut, which is cost plus about 10 per cent. The drug, whether patented or not, is available to anyone who wants to make it. That is the ground rule of OSDD and all partners accept this, says Brahmachari. The collaborating company in this case is Jubilant Organosys.
The molecule is kept generic from the beginning and the entire process of discovery, right from finding the molecule, is online and in full public gaze. People can offer corrections and suggestions, just like in wikipedia.
Other companies partnering OSDD are TCG Life Sciences, Prema’s Biotech, Sugen Life Sciences and Vimta Labs. This is besides public sector research institutes like Central Drug Research Institute. Of course, partners and admirers include World Health Organisation, which admitted yesterday that CSIR had created a model for open source that was the most unique.
Partners include hundreds of students from across the world who have in the last three months re-annotated the 4,000 genes of the TB bacterium. These include the 850-odd students from small towns and little-known colleges who are part of the Connect 2Decode programme. They have been keying in their reading of the available studies on these genes through Google groups. These studies are scattered all over the world. Now, they are being put together to create the most comprehensive visualisation of the TB genome at a conference in New Delhi this week.
Usually, a study is not pursued till the last lap. OSDD helps researchers go the whole hog, says project director Zakir Thomas. For the young students taking part in the project, Brahmachari calls it real education. “While the government offers scholarships to best science students, I am turning ordinary science students, the bottom-of-the-pyramid ones, into the best,” he says. “I myself never got a first class,” he adds.
Anshu Beulah Ram, a student from Jammu, was researching on two genes of TB for her thesis. A month with the project has exposed her to 4,000 of them.
OSDD is being watched with fondness by the government of India, especially since Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared this decade as one of innovation. What can be more innovative than this project?
