Stephen M. Maurer, Arti Rai, Andrej Sali, Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer?PLoS Medicine, December 28, 2004. Excerpt: 'Only about 1% of newly developed drugs are for tropical diseases, such as African sleeping sickness, dengue fever, and leishmaniasis. While patent incentives and commercial pharmaceutical houses have made Western health care the envy of the world, the commercial model only works if companies can sell enough patented products to cover their research and development (R&D) costs. The model fails in the developing world, where few patients can afford to pay patented prices for drugs....Two main kinds of proposals have been suggested for tackling the problem. The first is to ask sponsors—governments and charities—to subsidize developing-country purchases at a guaranteed price. The second involves charities creating nonprofit venture-capital firms ("Virtual Pharmas"), which look for promising drug candidates and then push drug development through contracts with corporate partners. In this article, we discuss the limitations of these two approaches and suggest a third, "open source," approach to drug development, called the Tropical Diseases Initiative (TDI). We envisage TDI as a decentralized, Web-based, community-wide effort where scientists from laboratories, universities, institutes, and corporations could work together for a common cause.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/28/2004 09:35:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
