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.