The Tropical Diseases Initative

We started this blog, as Marc writes, to explore the idea of an open source medicine development. Moreover, we want to make this blog into a decentralized discussion forum that would, hopefully, end in a more substantial contribution towards an open source medicine development. The approach for now is to discuss if and how this is possible in a decentralized open source format and later on to narrow down what diseases that would be in focus.

First, open source medicine development is an idea that allready has developed before Marc and me had some brainstorming about it over a pizza a week ago. When we went to the web to find out more about it we stumbled upon an allready existing initative called The Tropical Disease Initiative (www.tropicaldisease.org). Their aim is to "The Tropical Disease Initiative aims to provide a "kernel" for open source drug discovery. Such kernel should allow scientists from laboratories, universities, institutes, and corporations to work together for a common cause: find new drugs against tropical disieases such as Malaria or Tuberculosis" (from their webpage). This initiative was developed, as far as we understand (please correct us if we are mistaken) by Stephen M. Maurer, Arti Rai, and Andrej Sali. The link is to an article written by them in 2004 where they outlines the idea of open source medicine development with focus on why it is a good idea, especially in relation to tropical diseases since they are largely underfunded in terms of research. As the authors explain, the reason why tropical diseases does not receive enough attention is because of the incentive system that is dominating medical research today.

This incentive system/reward system does not benefit tropical diseases, as medicines are developed by private companies, that directs most of its research (naturally) on medicines that gives most economic benefits. Naturally diseases in the developed world will recieve most attention as consumers in the richest countries are more able to pay for medicines. Tropical diseases by the way are defined by the World Health Organization as all diseases that occur solely, or principally, in the tropics (http://www.who.int/topics/tropical_diseases/en/). Actually, only 1% of all medical research between 1975 to 1996 went to this category of diseases. There is no reason to suspect that this has changed substantialy in the last decade.

As Marc wrote in the last post, our initial idea started around doing this in relation to HIV/AIDS. Both becuase it is such a prevalent problem affecting so many people (33 million people in 2007 accoriding to UNAIDS) and it is also high on the international community's agenda exemplified by its place in the UN millenium goals (The 6th millenium goal is to combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases). Moreover, there are only about 3.3 million of 9.7 million people living with the disease in developing countries that have access to treatment. The main reason for this is the cost of medicines coupled with poor infrastructure, low awareness, stigma and other barriers. Our contribution would be on the medical side of things, at least in the beginning.

However, we are open to other ideas, suggestions and so on. The obvious benefit by focusing on HIV/AIDS is that it engages a lot of people, attention and possibly funding. The most important benefit for our purposes, which is to developing an open source medicine platform, is that a critical mass is needed in order for a decentralized development like open source to take place and HIV/AIDS can potentially attract a lot of people. For this idea to materlize, we need enough people engaged in the development and improvement of it in order to secure its progress and quality, what might be termed a critical mass.

There are a host of issues along the road that will need to be adressed in a coherent and good way like legal issues, practical testing of the drug, funding structure, and so on. However, this post will not deal with this. For the moment we hope to start a discussion about the pros and cons for this project and how to go from here. First, however, I want to adress a question that might pussle some people reading this post. If there allready are an initiative for dealing with tropical diseases, why do we need another? Let us first say, we do not intend to compete with The Tropical Disease Initiative. Our idea is to start a dialouge and create a base that will hopefully develop into something like The Tropical Disease Initiative or better; that our initiative can be an engine to get enough attention around The Tropical Disease Initiative to engage the critical mass that they miss. In other words, our goal is to create an open source medicine development initiative that will engage enough people to see it materialize and enable other non-comercial initatives to take advantage of it.

I look forward to the continuing discussion.

The amazing open source prosthetics initiative

One of the first things people say when you mention the option of open source drug development is that drug development is way more complicated, specialized and different from the so successful open source software development. Maybe this is true, but I refuse to believe that this means 'it can't be done'. Of course it is not the same. And of course it is a highly specialized field (which software development by the way is as well). But the fact that something is different does not mean it is impossible.

To demonstrate the possibility of open source medication development just take a look at the amazingly cool open prosthetics project. This is how they describe themselves:

"The Open Prosthetics Project is producing useful innovations in the field of prosthetics and freely sharing the designs. This project is an open source collaboration between users, designers and funders with the goal of making our creations available for anyone to use and build upon. Our hope is to use this and our complementary sites to create a core group of “lead users,” and to speed up and amplify the impact of their innovations in the industry. Our current list of active projects is available on the wiki. Please contribute or suggest your own."

According to Greg Milliken, ceo of Alibre Inc (the provider of CAD software to this project):

"The group is basically driving “open source” design. Medical product designers can post new ideas for prosthetic devices as CAD files on the OPP web site, which are then available to the public free of charge. Prosthetic users or other designers can download the CAD data, customize or improve upon the prosthesis, and then repost the new design on the site. Users are free to take 3D models to a fabricator and have the hardware built for less than the cost of buying a manufactured limb."

It is just a great initiative to speed up the development of prosthetics, make them more widely available and just design better, more user friendly prostehtics. Who said open source in the medical world does not work?!