Challenges in Drug Discovery
Despite major breakthroughs and tremendous progress in the field of drug discovery, there are millions of immature death every year due to lack of affordable and efficient drugs. Drug discovery and development is a costly, time consuming and laborious process. It requires approximately one billion dollars and ten years to bring a new drug molecule into the market. How to bring down cost and time required for discovering a new drug molecule is one of the major challenges in the field of drug discovery.
OSDD is a CSIR led team India Consortium with global partnership with a vision to provide affordable healthcare to the developing world by providing a global platform where the best minds can collaborate & collectively endeavor to solve the complex problems associated with discovering novel therapies for neglected tropical diseases like Malaria, Tuberculosis, Leshmaniasis, etc. It provides single platform for drug discovery, bringing together researchers, wet lab scientists, research organizations, clinicians, and students. The principal of OSDD is "Collaborate, Discover & Share" and motto is "Affordable healthcare for all".
Computational Resources for Drug Discovery (CRDD) is an important in silico module of OSDD. The CRDD web portal provides computer resources related to drug discovery from a single platform. The main focus of CRDD is to provide computational resources for researchers in the field of computer-aided drug design. It provides various webservers and software related to in silico drug designing, developing biological databases related to medicine and collecting and compiling various important resources for in silico drug designing.
In silico tools and techniques providing an alternative for reducing cost and time in drug discovery during various experimental phases. The computational methods for in silico drug discovery have been broadly divided into two main fields: bioinformatics and chemoinformatics. Chemoinformatics and other in silico tools related to computer-aided drug designing are dominated by proprietary or commercial companies, where these tools are costly with stringent license conditions. Due to heavy cost of chemoinformatics resources, computer-aided drug discovery is still a costly affair. In last few years CRDD team has developed open source webservers for computer-aided drug discovery. There are number of reasons why open source is not popular in the filed of drug discovery (particularly in chemoinformatics, pharmacoinformatics, clinical informatics) that includes; i) not available from single source, ii) difficult to install, iii) lack of infrastructure. In order to overcome some of the limitations we have developed OSDDlinux. It provides the popular open source software in the field of drug discovery from a single platform.
OSDDlinux is an open source operating system for drug discovery (customized linux) that integrates most of open source or freely available computational tools required for drug discovery.
In simple words, it is an in silico platform for providing enviroment for computer-aided drug design.
Due to its open source nature anybody can contribute towards drug discovery using OSDDlinux, particularly those who can not pay for commercial software (like students, researcher, academicains from developing world).
Initially this operating system has been developed on Ubuntu platform, now we are extending it to other linux platforms.
Open source OSDD initiative
Computational Resources for Drug Discovery
Challenges in developing in silico tools for Drug Discovery
OSDDlinux