Article Examines India’s Open Source TB Project
Sreelatha Manon, a writer for India's Business Standard, on Monday examined India's Open Source Drug Discovery project, a new Web-based platform that allows scientists and students to share research on tuberculosis bacteria and drug development. India's Department of Science and Technology's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in September 2008 launched the project in order to increase the pace of TB research. According to Manon, many drug companies are reluctant to invest in TB drug development because they consider TB research unprofitable. The project cost 1.5 billion Indian rupees, or about $29.4 million, Manon reports.
Since the project's launch, the site has registered 700 participants from 130 cities. The platform also currently features about 56 active projects, posted by scientists from organizations such as NIH; the Institute of Life Sciences in Hyderabad, India; and Anna University in Chennai, India. In addition, one of the "key components" of the portal is Systems Biology of Organisms, or SysBorg, which is a wiki-based platform that allows participants to share ideas and record project results in a community laboratory notebook. According to Manon, SysBorg currently hosts the largest database on TB bacteria.
Several scientists already have used the portal to further their research, Manon reports. Anshu Bharadwaj, a scientist at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, recently used the platform to complete a project with students and other researchers from across India. For the project, the team decoded 400 of the TB bacteria's 4,000 genes and published its findings on the site. Additional researchers now can review and confirm Bharadwaj's findings on the platform, Manon reports. According to Manon, another researcher has used the platform to publish targets for TB drug development, and an additional project has created a list of compounds that researchers can test against the biological targets. According to Bharadwaj, the platform allows research to happen simultaneously rather than in a linear fashion, which might shorten the amount of time needed to determine a project's success. In addition, CSIR plans to recruit college students to collaborate on these projects, which will help to train a new generation of disease researchers, Manon reports (Manon, Business Standard, 3/1).
