I (Mrinalini Kochupillai) recently had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Samir Brahmachari, the new Director General of CSIR. It was a pleasure to see the enthusiasm with which he spoke about his open source drug discovery model and his plans for the growth of CSIR. Given all the media attention that his OSDD has already received, I thought it would be best to dig a little deeper into the model. We provide not just excerpts from his interview, but also excerpts from his presentation on OSDD that he was kind enough share with us.

It was fortuitous that while I spoke to Dr. Brahmachari, other scientists and physicians were present. This gave me a chance to be party to the discussions between great minds and witness the concerns they all very clearly share for issues ranging from drug quality to affordability and pharmaceutical marketing tactics. Here are some of the excerpts:

Question: Congratulations at being appointed DG. I am sure it is an opportunity as well as challenge. How do you feel?

Answer: I’ve been given a job, entrusted with a responsibility and confidence of the Government. I have to execute the job and am happy to do it. In the 65 year history of CSIR, all leaders have taken responsibility and done the best that they could do what they thought to be appropriate for the country and the CSIR at that juncture. My job is to do the best that I can in this juncture of time, when India has opened up. My job is to keep CSIR relevant and progressive in the new environment, in the new resurgent India.

Question: Everyone is excited about your open source drug discovery model. Yet, there are some concerns that it may not be practical. We hope through this interview to address some of these concerns. Could you please elaborate upon the OS model and CSIRs IPR strategy?

Answer: Open Source is a passion of mine, and it is part of a larger IP strategy for CSIR. We at CSIR hope to use Open Source for two different projects which I will roughly divide for purposes of explanation into (a) Open Source in Pharmacogenomics and (b) Open Source in drug discovery for infectious diseases (especially TB). The latter has already been covered extensively in the media. I will touch upon that and discuss the pharmacogenomics model in more detail.

We need first to understand the background, which is true particularly for India and other developing countries. The need is to make drugs at low cost. In an environment where implementing subsidies and controls may not always be easy, it is best to discover/invent drugs at a low cost. In order to do this, we need to cut costs. For example, we don’t want to pay money to lawyers (Laughing)– I feel that [in protecting inventions] the lawyers make the most amount of money; for patenting, transactions, protection – in each aspect, we are paying the lawyers and this is one of the reasons why the costs go up.

In the open source model, we will just put the entire drug discovery process under a click wrap agreement [similar to the GNU GPL?] – yes, with appropriate modifications. And since we will follow a not for profit model, lawyers will work for us pro bono. » Read more