Sharing Knowledge: the Tropical Diseases Initiative

A group of researchers has published proposals for a new mechanism to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing on the development of medicines for tropical diseases.The Tropical Diseases Initiative is envisaged a decentralized, Web-based, community-wide effort where scientists from laboratories, universities, institutes, and corporations could work together for a common cause. The website - which seems to be largely under construction - is at www.tropicaldisease.org.Owen's comment: I can see how this would help secure more resources for computational biology - for example, in the identification of promising protein targets and perhaps some candidate chemical compounds. But for vaccines, at least, the big costs are in the clinical trials, licensure and production: it isn't clear how the TDI will help with this.