Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer? | PLoS Med

Citation: Maurer SM, Rai A, Sali A (2004) Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer? PLoS Med 1(3): e56. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0010056

"Only about 1% of newly developed drugs are for tropical diseases, such as African sleeping sickness, dengue fever, and leishmaniasis [1]. While patent incentives and commercial pharmaceutical houses have made Western health care the envy of the world, the commercial model only works if companies can sell enough patented products to cover their research and development (R&D) costs. The model fails in the developing world, where few patients can afford to pay patented prices for drugs.

It is easy and correct to say that Western governments could solve this problem by paying existing institutions to focus on cures for tropical diseases. But sadly, there does not appear to be enough political will for this to happen. In any case, grants and patent incentives were never designed with tropical diseases in mind.

Two main kinds of proposals have been suggested for tackling the problem. The first is to ask sponsors—governments and charities—to subsidize developing-country purchases at a guaranteed price [2,3,4]. The second involves charities creating nonprofit venture-capital firms (“Virtual Pharmas”), which look for promising drug candidates and then push drug development through contracts with corporate partners. In this article, we discuss the limitations of these two approaches and suggest a third, “open source,” approach to drug development, called the Tropical Diseases Initiative (TDI). We envisage TDI as a decentralized, Web-based, community-wide effort where scientists from laboratories, universities, institutes, and corporations could work together for a common cause (see www.tropicaldisease.org)...."