The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) initiative of CSIR has released the results of its ‘Connect 2 Decode' (C2D) project to re-annotate the biological and genetic information related to theMycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) genome, in New Delhi. The exercise is to cut short research time and work towards effective medicines to treat TB, which accounts for about 1,000 deaths a day in India. The situation becomes worse, given that TB is increasingly responding less to existing regimens. If a medicine were to emerge, several years down the line from this project, there will not be any royalty or IP-protection, he said. However, every contribution to the research will be attributed.
Under the C2D project, researchers and students pooled their time and skills using online tools to provide insights into 4,000 genes of the deadly pathogens. The researchers also mapped the genes as they relate to functional interactions and pathways. Their work is held in a shared database, which the OSDD will share through a globally accessible database with any research institutions involved in TB research, through its open portal. The gene map is similar to a Google map or a Wikipedia article that can be modified and updated as new information emerges on the features of the genome.
C2D's findings may help to reveal the previously undiscovered details of tuberculosis (TB); resulting in developing TB drugs in India and other developing countries. This is the first time that a comprehensive mapping of the Mtb genome has been made publicly available. From the usual closed-door, non-transparent and hierarchical manner in which scientific research is usually done in private and public quarters, the OSDD initiative has made TB-related research available to any researcher across the world.
CSIR believes that as there is a need to have a balanced view between health as a right and health as a business because there has been imbalance in this view that diseases like TB, with high mortality but low profitability, are neglected by the current system of pharmaceutical research. This is due to observed fact that as virtually no new TB drugs have been developed since the 1960s, the OSDD's model in particular holds great promise for the scientific community by stimulating the development of better drugs and diagnostics for patients.
As a first of its kind government initiative, the OSDD was launched in September 2008 by CSIR. It is a $35 million (Rs 146 crore) collaborative research effort that focuses primarily on TB. Its objective is to accelerate R&D for TB drugs. With a global community of nearly 3,000 members from 74 countries, the OSDD brings together scientists, doctors, students, policy experts, software professionals and others to work on TB research.
Though scientists have mapped several organisms from yeast to humans, culling all the information known about constituent genes in one place is among the holy grails of biology, being an extensively time consuming and expensive exercise. The MTB map will be hosted on a Web portal custom developed by Infosys Technologies Ltd, that uses an emerging format called Web 3.0. This format allows users to get better search results, when querying for data.
With people living with HIV in developing countries bearing the greatest burden of the disease, with the emergence and spread of TB that was resistant to treatment by the standard anti-TB drugs, there was an urgent global need for new drugs. New TB drugs are desperately needed. The existing treatment is a mixture of drugs that must be taken over 6–8 months period. Often, one of the biggest challenges facing healthcare professionals is to make sure that their patients finish the course of treatment.
Despite the seriousness of India’s TB problem, inadequate funds and a paucity of concerted research have crippled new drug discovery. CSIR’s Open Source DrugDiscovery (OSDD) aims to find new drug candidates by first collating all known information on the different genes that make up the bacterium on single web portal. Though the MTB genome was completely sequenced in 1998, meaning scientists knew the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) alphabets that made up the organism’s genes, less than 40% of these genes were deciphered or annotated.
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