PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases: Open Source Drug Discovery in Practice: A Case Study

Use the link to access the full text article from PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. An excerpt from the abstract reads as follows: “Background ... Open source drug discovery offers potential for developing new and inexpensive drugs to combat diseases that disproportionally affect the poor. The concept borrows two principle aspects from open source computing (i.e., collaboration and open access) and applies them to pharmaceutical innovation. By opening a project to external contributors, its research capacity may increase significantly. To date there are only a handful of open source R&D projects focusing on neglected diseases. We wanted to learn from these first movers, their successes and failures, in order to generate a better understanding of how a much-discussed theoretical concept works in practice and may be implemented... Conclusions/Significance... Technically TSLS is an open source project, whereas CSIR OSDD is a crowdsourced project. However, both have enabled high quality research at low cost. The critical success factors appear to be clearly defined entry points, transparency and funding to cover core material costs.... Author Summary... Open source drug discovery can be an influential model for discovering and developing new medicines and diagnostics for neglected diseases. It offers the opportunity to accelerate the discovery progress while keeping expenditures to a minimum by encouraging incremental contributions from volunteer scientists. Publishing raw data and results in the public domain is positive within the context of neglected diseases since it facilitates open collaboration while obviating the ability to patent any results. In this way it effectively de-links the research and development costs from the sales price of the end product, the new medicine or diagnostic. This case study demonstrates that implementations of the open source model can differ while still achieving the ultimate goal of obtaining high quality research at reduced costs. However, the importance of clearly defined entry points, transparency and funding are shared success factors. These findings present the practical challenges of implementing a theoretical concept and hopefully will assist other scientists in organizing future open source drug discovery projects...”