Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

India Launches Open Source Drug Discovery

Posted by timothy on from the with-enough-eyes-all-bugs-are-shallow dept.

sas-dot writes "India today launched a unique collaborative programme to discover drugs for infectious diseases common to the developing countries. The 'Open Source Drug Discovery' (OSDD) programme, launched by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), aims to build a consortium of global researchers and bypass the patent regime, which makes drugs expensive." Of course, all those pesky research, development and liability costs help, too.

30 comments

  1. Re:fp by boarder8925 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hopefully OSSD will soon find a cure for braindead first posts . . . .

    --
    Keep your eyes to the sky.
  2. Twice as much on marketing by jamie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development

    Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds, Jan. 7, 2008

    1. Re:Twice as much on marketing by mdfst13 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Where's the other 62% go? Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.

      Link to actual study: The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States

      I am not sure that free samples should be counted as a marketing cost. If they are counted, then they should be counted based on the cost to the company, not the retail cost (what the company would get if it had sold the sample). Use of such RIAA like tactics makes me very suspicious of the study. Such an obvious flaw strongly suggests that they picked the data to fit their theory rather than picking a theory to fit the data.

      They also increased their estimate by 30% for "unmonitored" expenses. I.e. they assume that there is uncollected data. They then claim that this still under reports expenses by alleging that there are other expense categories that are not included. They have no references for the 30% number; no evidence that 30% is the right number; no evidence that the other expense categories are not already included in the 30%.

      The best that could be said for this report is that it may be just as accurate as the reports from the pharmaceutical companies it decries.

    2. Re:Twice as much on marketing by Halo1 · · Score: 1

      Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.

      Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.

      --
      Donate free food here
    3. Re:Twice as much on marketing by mdfst13 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.

      And then if he does prescribe them to his patients, he starts them off with a free sample, right? And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples. As such, I think that free samples (as a cost) should simply appear as part of the production costs.

      Tylenol used to advertise that it was the most used by hospitals. Why was that? Because it was the cheapest. They sold to hospitals much more cheaply than they sold to consumers. Should we count that discount as a promotion cost? They used it as a promotion.

      The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D. That that's why drugs are so expensive. Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate), I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion. They are more a side effect of promotion IMO than a main component.

    4. Re:Twice as much on marketing by Halo1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples.

      If the patient has no money then they get virtually all costs back from our (Belgian) national healthcare system. Promotional samples don't even register as a blip on the radar when tackling healthcare challenges faced by "patients with no money". Trying to dress this up as some form of socially responsible charity is, as you like to say, disingenuous.

      Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate)

      Oh, please. Companies don't give stuff away to make things cheaper. That's all calculated into the price of the products they sell.

      Obviously, medicins that are more successful (as in: more people buy them, not necessarily "more effective") may be sold cheaper than the rest since they can make the same profits in aggregate anyway. That's a general business principle, and marketing (including handing out free samples) may be one way to get there.

      That does not mean that the best marketed product is also the best product though, nor that overall prices will be lower than if less money were spent on marketing by all parties involved and some other product got very popular for whatever reason.

      The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D.

      No, the basic complaint is that drug companies always justify their needs for continuation patents, shaky lawsuits against generic medicin companies, high prices, patents on research largely performed by/in cooperation with public institutions, etc., by their huge R&D budgets. When it then turns out that they spend more on marketing than on R&D, I think it's logical that people are a bit miffed.

      After all, they appear to need all that money more for marketing than for R&D. And if that's the case, overall healthcare quality may actually be better served with less exclusivity.

      I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion

      Yes, it's clear you like the pharma industry a lot and want to discredit that study as much as possible, but I've seen more disingenuous hand waving and armchair economic reasoning from you in these two posts than in that entire study. For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").

      --
      Donate free food here
    5. Re:Twice as much on marketing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is a business. Businesses spend money on marketing. They need to sell their product. They exist to sell things and make money so the owners and workers can buy food and houses.

      Life saving drugs are a luxury, not a right.

    6. Re:Twice as much on marketing by mdfst13 · · Score: 1

      For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").

      They only cited two studies in calculating their number. And they did cherry pick their numbers. They clearly picked all their numbers except one from the CAM study. The one number they picked from the IMS study was only picked because it was higher.

      Anyway, I did pick a number for the value of the drug samples as promotion. My number was 0. I said that I didn't think of samples as a promotion cost. I said that if someone disagreed (since that is in fact an arguable proposition), they could use the costing number rather than the retail number. It's true that I didn't give the costing number, although if you really wanted it, it was available in the study (it was the CAM number that they did not use, $6.3 billion).

      I'm not complaining about the data in the study. The data is fine (one of the sources that they used was the pharmaceutical industry; in fact, the number that I don't like came from the pharmaceutical industry). I'm complaining that the methodology they used to interpret the data was horrible. They took two studies that gave promotion numbers of $27.5 billion (the pharmaceutical industry number) and $33.5 billion and somehow arrived at a number of $57.5 billion.

      I apologize that I didn't copy and paste those numbers from the report previously, but I don't really care what the number is. I simply found their method of calculating it to be ridiculous. In particular, it should be obvious why CAM was using the wholesale cost rather than the retail cost. Pharmaceutical companies do not buy free samples from themselves at retail cost. Even the wholesale cost isn't really what's wanted here -- it should be the manufacture cost.

      The argument regarding counting free samples as a production cost rather than a promotion cost is that these drugs would have to get manufactured anyway. Having the free sample simply saves having to prescribe them. Unless you are claiming that someone who would not have bought the drug is using the free sample?

      There are any number of things that have a promotion benefit but no related promotion cost. For example, if your neighbor uses a drug and then you ask your doctor to prescribe it to you, the company benefited from that. However, would you really claim that such a referral cost the company in any way?

      Free samples make sense as a promotion cost in industries where one might take something for free that one wouldn't otherwise try, e.g. shampoo or gum. It doesn't make as much sense with prescribed drugs. It's also worth noting that there is a big difference with pharmaceutical samples, since they are given to the doctor who doesn't normally pay for them rather than to someone who does (e.g. the patient, the insurance, or the government).

  3. Sounds like a good idea, but.. by Chris+Rhodes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If it is truly open, won't corps just follow the research then throw money into their own labs at the end of the project? Then they could patent the chemical.

    How it works

    It seems to me that the project could be leeched off of fairly easily. E.g., at work package 10.

    Other than that, it is the inevitable result of high prices and monopolies. Open source, coops, public libraries; they all exist to let a larger group of people get access to limited resources for less. That's an interesting article.

    1. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 1

      Yes, that could happen.

      If it did, however, i'd expect a group of hundreds of thousands of cancer, AIDS, and other terminal illness patients who can't afford these potentially life-saving drugs to mob the CEO's of each pharmaceutical company which did.

      I know if I was going to die because some multi-billionnaire wanted a 5% increase on his bonus mooched research from a body designed to help those in exactly that situation, AND THEN STOPPED THAT VERY BODY PRODUCING THE DRUG BY PATENTING THE CHEMCAL, i'd be around his mansion with a few large cable ties, a can of petrol, and Zippo lighter.

      --
      Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
    2. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by invisiblerhino · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, if they want to do it right, they should just patent the drugs and then not enforce the patent. For two reasons. A) This is morally a good thing. B) It would drive the pharmaceuticals companies crazy.

      --
      xterm -n 8
    3. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...

      The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    4. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by Chris+Rhodes · · Score: 1

      Well, the real problem is that this process basically describes the type of drug they need. That lets a drug company step in and create a drug that exhibits the particular description (binding sites and weights and all that molecular interaction stuff.) Once they do that, the law lets them patent the molecule if it is unique.

      What I think would need to happen, is for the patent office to recognize that the molecule is only unique with respect to other molecules. I.e., it was built from a specification, which means that it was an obvious result. That would take the place of 'GPL-like'.

      Good luck with that though, because the logic could break any number of previously granted drug patents, especially if the leg-work for those drugs was done by other companies or universities.

    5. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 1

      One huge flaw in your logic; Pharmeceutical companies have more money, better lawyers, and an infinitely more ruthless business practice than any large software developer.

      Expect the first patent held by this F/OSD body held under a GPL-esque license to be contested in court by EVERY drug company. One after another, until every single penny is spent on legal defense.

      I envisage a Pharmaceutical Industry Ass. of America in the making.

      --
      Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
    6. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Patents are geographically limited. There is no equivalent of the Berne Convention for patents. All patent treaties do is say that patenting in one country does not count as disclosure for patenting in other countries so you can still file for patents there. In most non-US patent systems filing the patent has to be the first disclosure (patents were introduced to encourage disclosure - awarding patents to things that have already been disclosed is pointless). India does not have to permit patents on chemicals gained in this way.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    7. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you mean the Pharmaceutical Industry making an Ass of America, I think we're already there. I know I feel like an ass whenever I pay $100 for a prescription I could buy overseas for $15.

    8. Re:Sounds like a good idea, but.. by Princeofcups · · Score: 1

      Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...

      The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.

      They do this already. A new drug is released, and 7 (?) years later, when the generic hits the shelves, the original company comes out with the 12 hour time release version. 7 years later, when the generic 12 hour time release comes out, the original company releases the 24 hour time release. There is no reason to not sell the 24 hour time release from day one except to stretch out the patents.

      --
      The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
  4. I could go for some open source drugs... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Anyone else get excited and want to join up immediately when they first read the headline?

  5. Isn't that the strangest thing going? by WindBourne · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Big Drugs all grip that RD form the bulk of their costs and that is why they have heavy mark-ups. But in the end, it is one of the lowest parts. In fact, they spend more money on lobbying FDA, white house, and congress than they do on RD.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  6. Respect the cow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "The normal process of drug discovery, through the patent regime, has not worked very well for diseases in our part of the world."
    Big Pharma is only in it for the money, all you poor people with your third world health issues:
    Pay or Die.

  7. DRM by conureman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It will be interesting to see how the multinational drug rights management folks can kibosh this. U.N. sanctions?

    --
    The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
  8. Clinical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For development, yes, this might work. However, much of the cost in bringing a drug to market (not marketting it, just getting it ready) is in the clinical studies side. You have to buy the animals to test it in, you have to pay people to test it in safety studies and efficacy studies, plus the doctors and physicians to monitor them over long periods of time. etc..

    Meanwhile, a company pours money into optimizing the production strain; fine-tuning the media and culturing methods (assuming biologics rather than small molecule therapeutics) so that they're stable and suitable for large scale production. It's a time and money intensive process.

    For initial research, some discussion would be helpful, perhaps for production as well (but the choice of host strain, inducers, and vectors can all radically affect this as well). For the clinical side, there are no shortcuts. If someone in your study dies - even for unrelated causes - most big pharma would rather shut down the whole project than run the financial and publicity risk of having a recall years later. FDA regulations on NDAs and the like offer no shortcuts; so open-sourcing it won't help.

    Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

    1. Re:Clinical by Corwn+of+Amber · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but the standard practice for the tests are a bureaucrat's wet dream and anybody else's nightmare.

      Anyway... if India really wanted to help their poor, instead of trying to develop their own Big Pharma... They'd just say "We just don't recognize patent protection on drugs and we WILL produce them cheap and sell them for peanuts to our starving masses, so PLEASE go on disclosing how to make them in PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE patents, and FUCK your racketeering bottom line"

      Now THAT would send a message. And Big Western Pharma would do what, wage war on a nation that has nukes? Yeah right.

      --
      Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
  9. Yes but mostly No by Chris+Rhodes · · Score: 3, Informative

    The geographical location of the patent (U.S., Europe or China) will exclude foreign companies who are infringing. India can always complain and/or challenge the patents, but first they'll be excluded from some of the biggest markets in the world.

    Also, India is pro-patent when it comes to pharmaceuticals. So it is just as likely that Indian companies will leech off this research. Remember that it is the actual drug molecule that is patented.

    Take for example, escitalopram and citalopram, escitalopram is an enantiomer of citalopram. Escitalopram is patented by Forest Labs, and marketed as Lexapro. Lexapro was created and patented by Forest Labs (lundbeck) because citalopram (Celexa) lost its patent in 2003. Both drugs were designed to treat major depression and generalized anxiety disorder.

    It isn't the research that gets patented. It is the drug. In the case of citalopram and escitalopram, two drugs that are merely stereoisomers (mirror images.)

  10. Don't forget all the ancient texts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Both India and China have ancient scrolls and hieroglyphs of old age writings extolling the virtues of ordinary plant and animal cures.

    1. Re:Don't forget all the ancient texts by Corwn+of+Amber · · Score: 1

      About the effectiveness of cow dung for haemorrages and that of ground tiger dicks for aphrodisiacs? Yeah, you go develop an industry on that.

      Oh wait...

      --
      Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
  11. Re:fp by 4D6963 · · Score: 1

    Hopefully OSSD will soon find a cure for braindead first posts . . . .

    1. Ask OSSD for a research grant
    2. Suggest hiding new stories fron non-logged in users for 10 minutes
    3. ???
    4. Profit!

    --
    You just got troll'd!
  12. Open Source? Not Really. by virtualXTC · · Score: 1

    Can some one explain to me how this is open source or patent free? I went to register on their wiki and with the Licensing terms below. From what I can tell ideas are only shareable within OSDD and not portable to similar efforts in the outside word. Any contribution you make can possibly be patented by them and they are only bound to attempt to make drugs affordable. Sounds like an attempt at getting free labor to me; so long as one person can "afford" the drug, the drug is inherently "affordable" to that person. I AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING LICENCE TERMS ... skiping to section 3.... 3 Proprietary Rights 3.1 The Portal, its services, the content, Information, and results of collaborative research including, but not limited to, the identification of drug-able non-toxic targets, in vitro and in vivo validation, in silico screening of molecules, lead optimization, pre-clinical toxicity and clinical trials will constitute ï½Protected Collective Informationï½. You agree that the ownership of Protected Collective Information belongs solely to the OSDD and is the proprietary right of OSDD, to be held in trust on behalf of OSDD by CSIR to be used to further the Vision and Mission. 3.2 Anyone accessing the Protected Collective Information has an obligation to contribute any addition or improvements made to or using such Protected Collective Information or any research result or proprietary rights generated out of the Protected Collective Information, except as provided in these Terms, back to OSDD through this Portal to add to the Protected Collective Information. Any appropriation of the Protected Collective Information to acquire proprietary rights which is in violation of its Vision and Mission to will be violation of these Terms, liable to legal action under the applicable laws. 3.3 By becoming a member of OSDD and using this Portal and in consideration thereof you agree that any Information submitted by you or generated using the Portal shall form a part of the Protected Collective Information to be shared and used by the OSDD members for furtherance of its vision, to be held by OSDD acting through CSIR (India) in trust as Protected Collective Information and you authorize OSDD acting through CSIR (India) to take any action in furtherance of the vision of OSDD. Such actions taken by OSDD acting through CSIR (India) will be informed to its members through the Portal. 3.4 You agree that Protected Collective Information is a valuable proprietary right of OSDD and in consideration of your accessing the Protected Collective Information you promise to submit all further developments or improvements made by you or your agents, to or using the Protected Collective Information back to the OSDD to add to the Protected Collective Information for others to work on it and make further improvements on it. 3.5 You assign to OSDD the worldwide royalty free non exclusive license on any Information submitted by you to Protected Collective Information for the sole purpose of use of OSDD members for furthering the Vision and Mission and for that purpose only. It is understood that if your intellectual property rights are used for any purpose contrary to the Vision and Mission, this assignment shall stand unconditionally revoked. 3.6 In the event of your acquiring any intellectual property rights by making improvements or modifications on any part of the Protected Collective Information, you shall grant an unencumbered worldwide non exclusive right to the OSDD for use of such rights for further research in furtherance of its Vision and Mission. 3.7 You agree that by virtue of using the Protected Collective Information, even partly, on your technology or invention, whether patented or not or kept as your confidential information or not, you shall submit back to the Protected Collective Information the out put or the result of such use, in whatever form, whether such output contains the Information contained in the Protected Collective Information or not. 3.8 You agree that OSDD acting through CSIR may license any research result generated out of OSDD for the sole purpose of furthering the Vision and Mission of OSDD provided that there shall be no direct monetary gain or other benefit for CSIR out of such assignment.

    1. Re:Open Source? Not Really. by Isthatso · · Score: 1

      Is that so? They have qualified 'affordable' with 'developing world'. So it is not what is affordable to you and me but to the developing world. Granted, there are income disparities in developing world also. But majority of their population is below poverty line and so what is affordable to the developing world has to be affordable to this large population there. Does para enable them to steal your work? No way! A reading of 3 only shows that they have created a viral license to ensure that those who take from the open source contribute back to the open source. Isnt it a part of all open source licenses. Why should I contribute as a boinformatician the results of my research if it is going to be taken away by some smart alec and obtain a blocking patent without resulting in drug discovery? If they are not preventing that, then I would not contribute. Para 3 gives me the confidence that the portal will back me up. Also see, 4.1 You may access the Protected Collective Information under the condition that for any use of it you shall credit the author or the contributor. You may contribute to Protected Collective Information and shall get credit for it, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others. So I get credit for my works while preventing others from stealing my stuff!