Despite the grim situation, industry experts are positive that given the presence of a fast growing life sciences industry, India has a huge potential in leading the forefront in TB research. Dr Lucica Ditiu, executive secretary, Stop TB Partnership, comments, "The challenge is clearly huge, but India is rising in the global health arena. The country is moving towards universal access to quality TB care. It has the world's fastest growing pharmaceutical industry and it has huge potential to become a global frontrunner in biotech, medical and public health research."

Initiatives in the field
As a first-of-its-kind government initiative, the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) was launched in September 2008 by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). It is a $35 million collaborative research effort that focuses primarily on TB. The vision of OSDD is to provide affordable healthcare to the developing world by providing a global platform where scientists can collaborate and collectively endeavor to solve the complex problems associated with discovering novel therapies for neglected tropical diseases such as TB, thus accelerating research for TB drugs.

To achieve this goal, OSDD aims to reduce the risks in the discovery stage by facilitating collaborations between scientists, doctors, technocrats and students through a collaborative platform. The latest development on this front is he release of its ‘Connect 2 Decode' (C2D) project to re-annotate the biological and genetic information relating to the Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

"We need to have a balanced view between health as a right and health as a business. It is because there has been imbalance in this view that diseases like TB, with high mortality but low profitability, are neglected by the current system of pharmaceutical research," says Dr Samir K Brahmachari, director-general, CSIR. "As virtually no new TB drugs have been developed since the 1960s, the OSDD's model in particular holds great promise for the scientific community by stimulating the development of better drugs and diagnostics for patients," he adds.