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Finding Cures For Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source An Answer?

There's a paradigm in life science and drug development : only "lucrative" "markets" get exploited by R&D companies. In many occasions I've seen very promising drugs candidates or related research get canned because no money was to be made with it, even if millions would have been saved worldwide. The usual strategy to avoid this fate is to find a drug candidate that affect a "profitable" disease in addition to the "non-profitable" one. PLoS Medecine has an article about a possible solution titled "Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer?" The whole article is a very good read; a summary from ScienceDaily is available in the full post.

Only about 1% of newly developed drugs are for tropical diseases, such as African sleeping sickness and dengue fever. While patent incentives have driven commercial pharmaceutical companies to make Western health care the envy of the world, the commercial model only works if companies can sell enough patented products to cover their R&D costs and produce profits for shareholders. The model thus fails in the developing world, where few patients can afford to pay patented prices for drugs. The solution to this devastating problem, say Stephen Maurer, Arti Rai, and Andrej Sali in the premier open-access medical journal PLoS Medicine, is to adopt an "open source" approach to discovering new drugs for neglected diseases. They call their approach the Tropical Diseases Initiative (www.tropicaldisease.org), or TDI. "We envisage TDI as a decentralized, Web-based, community-wide effort where scientists from laboratories, universities, institutes, and corporations can work together for a common cause." What would open-source drug discovery look like? "As with current software colla
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Source:Science Daily, PLoS Medecine


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