Open Source Drug Discovery
OSDD is a CSIR-led Team India consortium with a global partnership. It's vision is to provide affordable healthcare to the developing world by providing a global platform where the best minds can collaborate & collectively endeavor to solve the complex problems associated with discovering novel therapies for neglected tropical diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis, etc. It is a concept to collaboratively aggregate the biological and genetic information available to scientists in order 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.
The success of open source models in Information Technology (For e.g. Web Technology, The Linux Operating System) and Biotechnology (For e.g. Human Genome Project) sectors, highlights the urgent need to initiate a similar model in healthcare, i.e. an open source model for drug discovery.
The Open Source Drug Discovery initiative will establish a novel open source platform for both computational and experimental technologies to make drug discovery for infectious/ neglected diseases, cost effective and affordable to the people of the developing world.
NKN currently connects OSDD partners throughout the country such as IMTECH Chandigarh, IGIB, JNU, Institute Of Life Sciences, etc. With NKN as their backbone, they have the capacity to provide a distributed environment to all their computing partners. This allows them to provide a unified platform for Bio-Informatics and an open source platform for drug discovery.