Open Source Drug Discovery is a
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India (CSIR)-led Team India Consortium with global participation
offering a collaborative drug discovery platform for
neglected tropical diseases
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a diverse group of tropical disease, tropical infections that are common in low-income populations in Developing country, developing regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. They are caused by a variety ...
like
leishmaniasis
Leishmaniasis is a wide array of clinical manifestations caused by parasites of the trypanosome genus ''Leishmania''. It is generally spread through the bite of phlebotomine sandflies, ''Phlebotomus'' and ''Lutzomyia'', and occurs most freq ...
, which draw limited attention of research-based pharmaceutical enterprises.
This program has a global community with over 7500 participants from 130 countries comprising researchers, academia, students, industries, educational institutions and so on.
Anyone who is committed to the discovery of drugs for
neglected diseases in an
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
mode can participate in the program. OSDD functions by bringing together experts from diverse backgrounds to focus on discovering and developing affordable drugs for tropical infections.
History
CSIR-OSDD was launched in September 2008.
This project was conceived by Prof
Samir K. Brahmachari, the Founder Director of CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology as an 11th Five year plan project of CSIR. This was approved by the Government of India with an overall outlay of Rs 45.96 crores (about $12 million).
The project motto is “Affordable healthcare for all” and makes use of open source philosophy, crowd –sourcing concepts and a collaborative research model, capitalizing on web based tools to fuel innovation and discover novel therapies.
All the data and resources generated by the community are openly shared through a web based portal called Sysborg 2.0 specifically designed for this purpose
The project has a healthcare model that blends together the policies of patenting and open source research, aiming to make novel drugs available as generic drugs, without Intellectual Property restrictions, and thus ensure affordability and accessibility.
The first action involved development of drugs for tuberculosis (TB) bacillus (''
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (M. tb) is a species of pathogenic bacteria in the family Mycobacteriaceae and the causative agent of tuberculosis. First discovered in 1882 by Robert Koch, ''M. tuberculosis'' has an unusual, waxy coating on its c ...
''). The project has two phases:
# Phase I (2008–2012) which will involve discovery and development of new drugs.
# Phase II (2012–2017) which will involve
clinical trial
Clinical trials are prospective biomedical or behavioral research studies on human participants designed to answer specific questions about biomedical or behavioral interventions, including new treatments (such as novel vaccines, drugs, dietar ...
s.
Process
OSDD started with the set up of a web portal, which is based on the
Wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
model of website so that participating agencies can easily contribute to or modify the content of the website. The information uploaded can be then peer-reviewed. New drugs being developed will be in
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work
A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
. The
generic drug
A generic drug is a pharmaceutical drug that contains the same chemical substance as a drug that was originally protected by chemical patents. Generic drugs are allowed for sale after the patents on the original drugs expire. Because the active ch ...
s will be taken up by pharmaceutical companies so that the drug will be commercialised at reasonable price.
Operational methodology
The process of drug discovery is divided into ten work packages, namely
[
# WP1 - Drug target identification. This promotes computational activities including ]Systems Biology
Systems biology is the computational modeling, computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological syst ...
research for identification of potential drug targets. It opens participation of academia, institutions and industries with strong inclination towards open source.
# WP2 - Expression of targets. This involves sharing experimental results on potential drug targets and development of assays.
# WP3 - Screen development. This involves the use of specific assays developed for different targets to screen large chemical compound libraries.
# WP4 - In silico docking. This involves determining the target and identification of potential sites on the hit compounds for synthesis of analogs, so that maximum potency and minimum toxicity are achieved.
# WP5 - Micro array gene expression for human cells and tissues with the best inhibitors. This involves identification of compounds with higher binding affinity for the target without altering expression profile of host cell.
# WP6 - Medicinal chemistry. This includes synthesis of improved compounds.
# WP7 - Lead optimization. This is to produce lead compounds with desirable effects while unaffecting the host.
# WP8 - Proteomics based lead affinity column to check for human cellular protein binding
# WP9 - Pre-clinical toxicity of the lead compounds
# WP10 - Clinical development of new molecular entities
Work packages 1–8 are within Phase I, while WP9 and 10 are within Phase II.
Organisation
OSDD is a collaborative project and a unit of CSIR. Prof. Samir K. Brahmachari, Former Director General of CSIR is the "Chief Mentor" of the Open Source Drug Discovery Project. M. Vijayan, President of the Indian National Science Academy
The Indian National Science Academy (INSA) is a national academy in New Delhi for Indian scientists in all branches of science and technology.
In August 2019, Dr. Chandrima Shaha was appointed as the president of Indian National Science Academ ...
, V. M. Katoch, Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex body in India for the formulation, coordination and promotion of biomedical research, is one of the oldest and largest medical research bodies in the world.
The ICMR is funded by the Gove ...
(ICMR), and N.K. Ganguli, former Director General of ICMR, are the Mentors. Individual projects are taken up by participating bodies and are managed by a Principal Investigator.[ These projects are centrally supervised by the OSDD project director Dr Sarala Balachandran at CSIR.
]
Funding
The core funding of OSDD is from the Government of India. For the period of September 2008 to March 2012, Government of India had earmarked Rs 45.96 crores (about $12 million) for the project. The funds are used for funding the scientific projects, setting up infrastructure, and supporting ongoing activities of the project. Up to 2012, OSDD was a project under ‘National Laboratories Scheme’ of CSIR. For the 12th five-year plan during 2013-2017, the planning commission has approved the continuation of OSDD as a part of Scheme for Open Innovation of CSIR.
Achievements
OSDD is joined by 7,500 registered participants from different parts of the world. There are about 110 research projects being carried out. The collaborative work has identified more than 60 potential drug targets of ''M. tuberculosis''. There are seven targets that are being examined. The first international publication of the consortium was in 2009 on the integrative genomics map of ''M. tuberculosis''. Since then more than a dozen of research are published. OSDD currently operates the OSDD Chemistry outreach programme (OSDDChem). Under this system, students are trained in synthetic chemistry
As a topic of chemistry, chemical synthesis (or combination) is the artificial execution of chemical reactions to obtain one or several products. This occurs by physical and chemical manipulations usually involving one or more reactions. In mod ...
and the compounds synthesized in the universities, institutes and colleges in OSDDChem centres are submitted to the OSDDChem database and sent to CSIR-CDRI. These molecules are then taken up for screening at CSIR-CDRI for anti-TB and anti-malarial activity.
References
External links
* {{official website
Profile at OpenHealthNews
Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment
Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) Open Lab
See also
* International Labour Organization
The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice by setting international labour standards. Founded in October 1919 under the League of Nations, it is the first and o ...
* Basic research
Basic research, also called pure research or fundamental research, is a type of scientific research with the aim of improving scientific theories for better understanding and prediction of natural or other phenomena. In contrast, applied resear ...
Scientific organisations based in India
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research
Organizations established in 2008
Free culture movement
Pharmacy organisations in India