The 49th Shriram Institute Founder Memorial lecture by the Shriram Institute for Industrial Research recently organised its 49th Founder Memorial lecture in the Capital. Prof Samir K Brahmachari, director general, CSIR and secretary, DSIR, Government of India (GOI) urged the students that though India has made rapid strides in introducing new vaccines and medicines that have improved healthcare significantly, our scientific understanding of causative elements of many of these diseases is still far from satisfactory. It is the need of the hour to chart a new route, an open source way for providing affordable healthcare for all by providing innovative solutions for a new India.
“The challenge of drug discovery for infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria etc calls for an extensive scientific endeavor. like the Human Genome Project— one that could bring together best minds of the field on a common global drug discovery platform and enable free sharing of knowledge. There is a need to encourage disruptive innovators who can work in the open source by engaging youngsters and sharing all the data, knowledge and resources in an open environment to solve problems, that will benefit the entire world,” Brahmachari said who spoke on the Open Source Drug Discovery: An Innovative Model for Affordable Healthcare for All.
OSDD with the help of Infosys, has built a semantic web based portal called Sysborg 2.0 where creation of virtual teams has been done to bring together researchers across the globe to worry about a common problem. Through OSDD, students across the nation are encouraged to synthesize novel molecules which are then screened for TB, Malaria and other neglected diseases in an open source mode.
Dr KM Chacko, director, Shriram Institute along with Dr Manju Sharma, former secretary, Dept of Biotechnology, GoI and chairperson of the Shriram Institute for Industrial Research hosted the event.