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India Launches Open Source Drug Discovery 30

Posted by timothy from the with-enough-eyes-all-bugs-are-shallow dept.
sas-dot writes "India today launched a unique collaborative programme to discover drugs for infectious diseases common to the developing countries. The 'Open Source Drug Discovery' (OSDD) programme, launched by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), aims to build a consortium of global researchers and bypass the patent regime, which makes drugs expensive." Of course, all those pesky research, development and liability costs help, too.
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India Launches Open Source Drug Discovery More

India Launches Open Source Drug Discovery

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  • Twice as much on marketing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jamie ( 78724 ) Works for Slashdot <jamie@slashdot.org> on Tuesday September 16, 2008 @08:31AM (#25024341) Journal

    the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development

    Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds [sciencedaily.com], Jan. 7, 2008

    • Big Drugs all grip that RD form the bulk of their costs and that is why they have heavy mark-ups. But in the end, it is one of the lowest parts. In fact, they spend more money on lobbying FDA, white house, and congress than they do on RD.

    • Re:Twice as much on marketing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mdfst13 ( 664665 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2008 @09:31AM (#25025179)

      Where's the other 62% go? Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.

      Link to actual study: The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States [plosjournals.org]

      I am not sure that free samples should be counted as a marketing cost. If they are counted, then they should be counted based on the cost to the company, not the retail cost (what the company would get if it had sold the sample). Use of such RIAA like tactics makes me very suspicious of the study. Such an obvious flaw strongly suggests that they picked the data to fit their theory rather than picking a theory to fit the data.

      They also increased their estimate by 30% for "unmonitored" expenses. I.e. they assume that there is uncollected data. They then claim that this still under reports expenses by alleging that there are other expense categories that are not included. They have no references for the 30% number; no evidence that 30% is the right number; no evidence that the other expense categories are not already included in the 30%.

      The best that could be said for this report is that it may be just as accurate as the reports from the pharmaceutical companies it decries.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Halo1 ( 136547 )

        Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.

        Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by mdfst13 ( 664665 )

          Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.

          And then if he does prescribe them to his patients, he starts them off with a free sample, right? And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples. As such, I think that free samples (as a cost) should simply appear as part of the production costs.

          Tylenol used to advertise that it was the most used by hospitals. Why was that? Because it was the cheapest. They sold to hospitals much more cheaply than they sold to consumers. Should we count that discount as a promotion cost? They use

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Halo1 ( 136547 )

            And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples.

            If the patient has no money then they get virtually all costs back from our (Belgian) national healthcare system. Promotional samples don't even register as a blip on the radar when tackling healthcare challenges faced by "patients with no money". Trying to dress this up as some form of socially responsible charity is, as you like to say, disingenuous.

            Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate)

            Oh, please. Companies don't give stuff away to make things cheaper. That's all calculated into the price of the products they sell.

            Obviously, medicins that ar

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mdfst13 ( 664665 )

              For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").

              They only cited two studies in calculating their number. [plosjournals.org] And they did cherry pick their numbers. They clearly picked all their numbers except one from the CAM study. The one number they picked from the IMS study was only picked because it was higher.

              Anyway, I did pick a number for the value of the drug samples as promotion. My number was 0. I said that I didn't think of samples as a promotion cost. I said that if someone disagreed (since that is in fact an arguable proposition), they could use the co

  • Sounds like a good idea, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chris Rhodes ( 1059906 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2008 @08:36AM (#25024403) Journal
    If it is truly open, won't corps just follow the research then throw money into their own labs at the end of the project? Then they could patent the chemical.

    How it works [osdd.net]

    It seems to me that the project could be leeched off of fairly easily. E.g., at work package 10.

    Other than that, it is the inevitable result of high prices and monopolies. Open source, coops, public libraries; they all exist to let a larger group of people get access to limited resources for less. That's an interesting article.
    • Yes, that could happen.

      If it did, however, i'd expect a group of hundreds of thousands of cancer, AIDS, and other terminal illness patients who can't afford these potentially life-saving drugs to mob the CEO's of each pharmaceutical company which did.

      I know if I was going to die because some multi-billionnaire wanted a 5% increase on his bonus mooched research from a body designed to help those in exactly that situation, AND THEN STOPPED THAT VERY BODY PRODUCING THE DRUG BY PATENTING THE CHEMCAL, i'd be a

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by invisiblerhino ( 1224028 )
      Well, if they want to do it right, they should just patent the drugs and then not enforce the patent. For two reasons. A) This is morally a good thing. B) It would drive the pharmaceuticals companies crazy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...

      The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.

      • Well, the real problem is that this process basically describes the type of drug they need. That lets a drug company step in and create a drug that exhibits the particular description (binding sites and weights and all that molecular interaction stuff.) Once they do that, the law lets them patent the molecule if it is unique.

        What I think would need to happen, is for the patent office to recognize that the molecule is only unique with respect to other molecules. I.e., it was built from a specification,
      • One huge flaw in your logic; Pharmeceutical companies have more money, better lawyers, and an infinitely more ruthless business practice than any large software developer.

        Expect the first patent held by this F/OSD body held under a GPL-esque license to be contested in court by EVERY drug company. One after another, until every single penny is spent on legal defense.

        I envisage a Pharmaceutical Industry Ass. of America in the making.

      • Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...

        The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.

        They do this already. A new drug is released, and 7 (?) years later, when the generic hits the shelves, the original company comes out with the 12 hour time release version. 7 years later, when the generic 12 hour time release comes out, the original company releases the 24 hour time release. There is no reason to not sell the 24 hour time release from day one except to stretch out the patents.

    • Patents are geographically limited. There is no equivalent of the Berne Convention for patents. All patent treaties do is say that patenting in one country does not count as disclosure for patenting in other countries so you can still file for patents there. In most non-US patent systems filing the patent has to be the first disclosure (patents were introduced to encourage disclosure - awarding patents to things that have already been disclosed is pointless). India does not have to permit patents on che
      • The geographical location of the patent (U.S., Europe or China) will exclude foreign companies who are infringing. India can always complain and/or challenge the patents, but first they'll be excluded from some of the biggest markets in the world.

        Also, India is pro-patent when it comes to pharmaceuticals. So it is just as likely that Indian companies will leech off this research. Remember that it is the actual drug molecule that is patented.

        Take for example, escitalopram and citalopram, escitalopram

  • I could go for some open source drugs... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone else get excited and want to join up immediately when they first read the headline?

  • DRM (Score:3, Interesting)

    by conureman ( 748753 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2008 @10:05AM (#25025643)

    It will be interesting to see how the multinational drug rights management folks can kibosh this. U.N. sanctions?

  • Clinical (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For development, yes, this might work. However, much of the cost in bringing a drug to market (not marketting it, just getting it ready) is in the clinical studies side. You have to buy the animals to test it in, you have to pay people to test it in safety studies and efficacy studies, plus the doctors and physicians to monitor them over long periods of time. etc..

    Meanwhile, a company pours money into optimizing the production strain; fine-tuning the media and culturing methods (assuming biologics rather th

    • Yeah, but the standard practice for the tests are a bureaucrat's wet dream and anybody else's nightmare.

      Anyway... if India really wanted to help their poor, instead of trying to develop their own Big Pharma... They'd just say "We just don't recognize patent protection on drugs and we WILL produce them cheap and sell them for peanuts to our starving masses, so PLEASE go on disclosing how to make them in PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE patents, and FUCK your racketeering bottom line"

      Now THAT would send a message. And Big

  • Can some one explain to me how this is open source or patent free? I went to register on their wiki and with the Licensing terms below. From what I can tell ideas are only shareable within OSDD and not portable to similar efforts in the outside word. Any contribution you make can possibly be patented by them and they are only bound to attempt to make drugs affordable. Sounds like an attempt at getting free labor to me; so long as one person can "afford" the drug, the drug is inherently "affordable" to t
    • Is that so? They have qualified 'affordable' with 'developing world'. So it is not what is affordable to you and me but to the developing world. Granted, there are income disparities in developing world also. But majority of their population is below poverty line and so what is affordable to the developing world has to be affordable to this large population there. Does para enable them to steal your work? No way! A reading of 3 only shows that they have created a viral license to ensure that those who take

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