Hacking Biology
Jacob Koshy -
Monday, September 15, 2008 7:01 PM
Welcome to Drugapedia. CSIR director-general Samir Brahmachari, believes that spirited college students, who get their kicks from hacking college websites, may be more useful than lab-weary biologists at discovering drugs for tuberculosis and malaria. That's what Open Source Drug Discovery, formally launched by science minister Kapil Sibal on Monday, is all about it. Solve a problem, a tiny part of it, brag about having contributed to the development of a new drug on your resume (maybe a bike, or a cash award, says Brahmachari) but forget intellectual property (IP).
Let industry test these drugs, via clinical trials and take it to the market. Bingo, you've cut down the biggest hurdle to new drug development: Research and Development costs.
Because markets dictate companies' decisions to invest in drug R&D ( it's said that it takes a billion dollars to bring a new drug to the market), diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, that mostly affect poor people who may not be able to afford these drugs, are neglected.
A WHO initiative called the Tropical Disease Initiative, also works on a similar principle. But I believe that the charm of such initiatives--atleast in India-- is less about discovering a drug and more about making our net-savvy techie undergrads appreciate biology.
The OSDD system hinges on the belief that new drugs don't always come out of flasks and beakers. Computer models and algorithms may well provide the first steps to developing a new drug. However our higher education system, has a terrible system of compartmentalizing graduates--computer grads learn servers and the data management; civil engineers learn software packages that help them design buildings and bridges. A biology honours student crams his way through the sex lives of amoebae and bacteria, and cockroach dissections, and does a 'software programming' course from NIIT. All of them graduate, get hired by the big-money Infosys' and TCS, and spend their lives coding banking software. (and this after companies complain that they have to 'retrain' them)
Though some of the IITs do offer BTechs in biotechnology, i'm not sure they are top priority courses (A quick check shows most are dual-degree B.Tech/M.Tech programmes)
While the open source approach is certainly noble and workable, I think it will be a while before we read 'College dropout discovers new TB drug,' because it will be sometime before our best hackers think like the Mycobacterium tuberculosis.