Tropical Disease Initiative Releases Kernel

No, really:

There is an urgent need for identifying new targets for drug discovery. This urgency is even more relevant for infectious diseases affecting third-world countries, which have been historically neglected by the pharmaceutical industry. For example, only ~10% of the R&D resources have been spent on illnesses that represent the 90% of the total disease burden in the world (Munos 2006), which translates in that just ~1% of newly developed drugs are for tropical diseases (Maurer et al. 2004).

At the beginning of the 90s, an initial Linux kernel conceived and created by Linus Torvalds paved the way for a wealth of open and free software programs and operating systems. Here we introduce what we believe can be regarded as an initial kernel for drug discovery with the hope that it will sparkle new ways for developing drugs against organisms that cause tropical diseases. The TDI kernel (v1.0) includes 297 potential drug targets against the 10 selected genomes and is freely and publicly accessible in a World Wide Web server, which was developed with Web2.0 tools for easy dissemination of the deposited data.

It's amazing how metaphors can spread.

You can browser the kernel - *their* kernel - here.

A Passionate Plea Against Patents

One of the winners of the the 2007 essay contest on "Equitable access: research challenges for health in developing countries" is the following passionate diatribe against the murderous inequity of patents:

The usual, if untenable, reason for granting patent monopolies is that excess revenue is spent on research for new drugs and that this stimulates further research and leads to more innovations. On the contrary, there is hardly any pharmaceutical company that spends more than 15% of its annual revenue on research. The rest goes to other things: advertising, marketing, lobbying, etc. Their research on diseases found in developing countries has always been insufficient. New drugs for the treatment of tropical diseases are rare and far between, and are often not the result of pharmaceutical industry research. Research is expensive and requires lots of money, no doubt. It takes resources to generate innovation. However, maintaining pharmaceutical patents is even more expensive. Like Belding Scribner’s shunt, innovation must address needs and reach the people who have those needs; otherwise it is not innovation.

What we need is a paradigm shift, a new way of organizing, promoting and financing research and innovation, one that would ensure an intercontinental balance of interests and research priorities.

(Via Open Access News.)