Spurred by the progress of the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) scheme, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is planning to expand its scope of work to include more areas like drug development and delivery.

The OSDD programme, which has emerged as a new platform for innovation in the domain of affordable healthcare, will expand to cover Open Source Drug Discovery, Open Source Drug Development, Open Source Drug Delivery, Open Source Disease Diagnostics during the current Plan period, sources said.

Currently the programme, launched in August 2007, has three specific elements -- Open Source Drug Discovery Programme (OSDDP), Distributed Organic Chemical Synthesis (DOCS) Programme, and Science 3.0: Open Innovation, Crowd Sourcing and Open Source Knowledgeware. An allocation of Rs.70 crore has been made under this scheme during the current year.

“OSDD seeks to develop molecules for treatment of tuberculosis in open source mode. It has received overwhelming response in terms of active participation from various institutions and scientific groups of India as well as from abroad. Presently there are more than 2000 contributors in the OSDD web portal which also include contributors from Berkeley, Harvard, IISc, AIIMS, IITs etc. The OSDD distributed virtual library has over 50 institutions and more than 2000 researchers as a part of this initiative,” a senior CSIR said.

“A systems biology platform for tuberculosis research has been developed in the first phase. The platform offers a comprehensive resource of annotations, drug information, host pathogen interaction, polymorphism, gene expression and pathways. This platform would be useful for researchers in identifying and assessing drug targets and vaccine candidates,” he said.

The CSIR is planning to extend drug discovery in open mode also to malaria this year. The target for the current five year plan is to create 4,00,000 compounds. A distributed organic chemistry programme will be initiated to synthesize large number of compounds in Universities and colleges. The contours of the Science 3.0 programme will be developed through formulation of projects that are focused towards Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) as the country has more than 26 million MSMEs that account for 46 per cent of manufacturing output and 40 per cent of export volume of the country.