After reading about India’s new Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project this week (1), I couldn’t help but feel -- amid the current housing/financial/Wall Street/economic crisis -- at least one thing is moving in the right direction: collaborative efforts to accelerate neglected disease product development. OSDD, the newest entrant in this effort, incorporates a web-based platform for scientists and students all over the world (NIH and the Institute of Life Sciences in Hyderabad, India are major supporters) to share research and collaborate on drug discovery projects for malaria, TB and other neglected diseases. One such project leveraged the world’s largest Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) database (hosted by OSDD) to bring together 13 researchers across India to decode 400 of the 4,000 genes of MTB in less than 6 months: years of work for a lone researcher.
Until recently, these collaborative developments have generally been one-off, closed-door, disease-specific arrangements where industry offers up its unprofitable compounds to the non-profit or public sector in exchange for good PR (2)(3). I would like to applaud these ground-breaking partnerships that have connected all sectors and enabled relevant innovators access to the tools they need to make life-saving progress. But while these laudable arrangements have paved the way for greater future cooperation, they paradoxically perpetuate the vertical, siloed approach that global health has taken. This approach leaves much to be desired in the way of collaboration, information-sharing and open communication, both upstream and down, and we – as a global health community – can do better.OSDD is a welcome addition to the upstream product development game, but I would be remiss not to mention its predecessor: Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD). A relative veteran in this space, CDD has taken a for-profit approach to its web-based platform for preclinical information sharing. With broad buy-in from academia, industry, and non-profits, CDD has recently secured a two-year grant from the Gates Foundation to create an open-source TB database for interested researchers (4)Now, being the very adept blog reader that you are, alarms should already be going off in your head regarding this overlap of efforts: the exact type of overlap that these initiatives are created to avoid! As these web-based collaborative efforts help to open the metaphorical doors of information sharing, we must be sure not to take two steps back by designing them vertically and hindering communication. Ideally, these initiatives will become cross-disease, transparent, and inclusive. It would be naïve to think that malaria researchers have nothing to learn from dengue researchers, or that promising compounds against TB would be useless when applied to other drug targets. From supply chains to disease surveillance, better communication and improved information pathways can often lead to greater social benefit in global health efforts; these upstream R&D platforms are no exception.(1)http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=57242(2)http://www.dndi.org/newsletters/16/3_3.html(3)http://newsroom.lilly.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?releaseid=338976(4)http://collaborativedrug.com/blog/news/2008/11/17/collaborative-drug-discovery-receives-gates-foundation-grant-to-support-the-development-of-a-database-to-accelerate-discovery-of-new-therapies-against-tuberculosis/
