Bangalore, Nov 27, 2009: A unique Indian attempt to pool the expertise of researchers in the country and abroad through a collaborative, sharing model of exchanging key discoveries to find a cure to the dreaded tuberculosis(TB) disease has got a boost with more than 2000 researcher joining the effort within a short span of 14 months of its launch.
November 23, 2009 is another red letter day in the annals of the programme, called the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD), launched in September 2008, when the 2000th member joined this network. In fact, on this day the total number of people on this collaborative effort stood at 2011.
The initiative is mentored by the director-general of India’s publicly funded research agency, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Dr Samir K Brahmachari, himself a top geneticist.
OSDD is a $ 38 million ( Rs 175 crore) collaborative effort, launched in September 2008, to expand our understanding of the biology of the dreaded Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) which could lead to the development of novel drugs to treat the disease and if possible prevent its occurrence. It is one of the oldest and most neglected diseases which kills millions of poor people around the world. . It is a concept to collaboratively aggregate the biological and genetic information available to scientists in order to use it to hasten the discovery of drugs. This will provide a unique opportunity for scientists, doctors, technocrats, students and others with diverse expertise to work for a common cause.
“ Though Mtb was sequenced a decade back, the standard databases have not been annotated in real biological processes, more than 1000 of the near 4000 genes encoded by the organism. This is symptomatic of the problem of neglected diseases of the poor,” said Dr Zakir Thomas, the OSDD project director at CSIR coordinating the mammoth task.
The massive work done by the programme and the increasing interest level in the project has won all round praise so far. “To have 2000 registered users within a year is a fantastic achievement. I am really proud of the efforts,” said a congratulatory message from the former chief of CSIR, Dr R A Mashelkar. Hundreds of such congratulatory messages have been exchanged in the network in the last few days. Interestingly even some of the skeptics of such collaborative efforts, in contrast to the highly secretive, proprietary nature of drug discovery programs, have appreciated the OSDD’s efforts.
“ I was a skeptic about OSDD when we discussed it about a year ago. I am always happy to be proven wrong, however, especially where the results of the other way of doing things are positive, “ wrote Dr Richard Wilder, a senior executive of Microsoft.
In fact, there is a widespread global interest about the OSDD project. It is designed along the lines two major collaborative projects which are successful global models: the international consortium approach that decoded the human genome in the 1990s and the open source software development that led to the creation of the free-sharing Linux operating system.
Computer giant HP is a key supporter of the program. Other computer software companies too are keenly watching the project’s progress. “ This ( 2000 members) is great news! An important milestone. Congratulations to everyone and I am hoping for an exponential growth. A number of 20K by Dec-2010 would be a good number to aspire for…,” says a post by Mr Uday Bhaskarwar, a vice president at Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies.
The program has taken up nearly 120 projects which are online now for every one work. Some of these projects have produced excellent results. The community has several credits to be proud of including open peer review, open funding review, large number of real time data on open lab notebooks.
“All our funded projects have posted their quarterly progress online, including their ongoing research results. The first OSDD international publication (PMID: 19683474) arising out of virtual collaboration, with due author credits even to collaborating students, is available online, “said Dr Thomas.
Of course, the 2000-member celebrations are already over. The project team is moving towards its next goal with renewed vigor. The next big leap planned is to completely re-annotate the MTb genome for which OSDD has launched ‘Connect to Decode’ 2010 (c2d.osdd.net). Within hours of its announcement, more than 500 researchers have volunteered to join this new initiative. The OSDD project team hopes to select 150 members from this group and bring them together face-to-face in New Delhi in April 2010 and complete the task methodically.
BioSpectrum Bureau
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