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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.

6 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. 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. 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 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. 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.
  4. 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.