“Open-source science” project will seek to improve synthesis of schistosomiasis drug

11 Feb 2010

Paul Chinnock

Source: TropIKA.net

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Schistosoma haematobium: free living larval stage of one species that causes schistosomiasis. WHO/TDR/Stammers.

For some of the infectious diseases of poverty there is a desperate need to develop new drugs. In other cases, for example schistosomiasis, the challenge is to get effective treatments that already exist to all those who need them.

The drug praziquantel is an effective treatment for schistosomiasis and mass drug administration programmes do succeed in reaching millions of people at risk of this debilitating disease. According to WHO, in 2009 17.5 million people were treated across all the endemic countries. However, many more did not receive treatment and one of the main factors responsible is a shortage of the drug. A scientist now hopes to persuade research chemists across the world to share their time and expertise in a collaborative project to find a cheaper and more effective means to synthesize praziquantel.

WHO says that, in 2009, it was planned that up to 69 million people would be treated for schistosomiasis, representing 30% of the estimated number of infected people in sub-Saharan Africa. This would need 171 million tablets of praziquantel. In the event, only 50 million tablets were procured, leaving a gap of 121 million.

Matthew Todd, a chemist at the University of Sydney has obtained funding amounting to US$350,000 to support his project. He intends to go about the work using an approach known as “open-source science”. All results will be published, as soon as they are available, on the project’s website, free of all intellectual property restrictions. Substantial contributors will all become authors of any papers subsequently published in academic journals.

In an article in PLoS NTDs [1], on which Todd is one of a team of authors, the concept is explained in more detail. Open source drug discovery is, they say, a promising alternative to conventional patent-based drug development, that has so far remained elusive: “A major stumbling block has been the absence of a critical mass of pre-existing work that volunteers can improve through a series of granular contributions”. They have set up what they term as a “kernel” that “provides a base of drug targets and lead candidates around which an open source community can nucleate”. This kernel, which is being offered under the Creative Commons attribution share-alike license for free and unrestricted use, can be accessed at: http://www.tropicaldisease.org.

More information on Todd’s praziquantel project may be found in a recent Nature news story [2].

References

1. Ortí L, Carbajo RJ, Pieper U, Eswar N, Maurer SM, et al. (2009). A Kernel for Open Source Drug Discovery in Tropical Diseases. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 3(4): e418. Available from: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19381286

2. Butler D (2010). Open-source science takes on neglected disease. Nature News; 2010: 4 Feb. Available from: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100204/full/news.2010.50.html