New Delhi, April 11: Indian scientists have mapped the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) genome, a first step towards providing a cost-effective drug for TB, a disease that kills 1,000 Indians every day.

Dr Samir Brahmachari, director-general of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), said, “Our scientists, along with 800 scientific researchers from different universities, have pooled their skills using online tools to provide insights into the 4,000 genes of this deadly pathogen.”
“We have done this under the unique open source drug discovery (OSDD) and anyone in the world is free to participate in this effort. We hope that within 18 to 24 months we will be able to take one molecule to the clinical trial stage,” he added.
The unique aspect of the CSIR push is that there is no attempt to patent the drug, as is the case with the profit-driven pharmaceuticals industry. Rather, this is an entirely collaborative effort with the active participation of Systems Biology International of Japan led by Dr H. Kitano and his team.
The Indian and Japanese scientists have created a “designer platform” whereby a map of the data generated has been created, thereby leading to an actual visualisation. This “Connect @ Decode” project will help experts re-annotate biological and genetic information, he said.
The TB gene map has been put on the Web, at www.osdd.net, for free access. The Indian scientific community has always been concerned that in the last 50 years there had been no breakthrough in work towards a new TB drug despite WHO figures confirming that 1.7 million people die globally every year from TB.
Dr Zakir Thomas of CSIR believes the main reason for this is that for far too long TB has been looked upon as a “poor man’s disease”. “The present TB regime consists of four drugs given to patients with the span of treatment extending between six and nine months. But a large percentage of TB patients are not able to sustain this regime over so many months and tend to drop out after a few weeks of treatment. This results in a relapse and they then suffer from TB, which is drug-resistant,” Thomas explained.
The other problem in finding a cure for TB has been that conventional market-based patent incentives have proved ineffective in addressing the public health needs of developing countries and only one per cent of newly developed drugs have targeted neglected diseases. “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, have been neglected by the current pharma regime,” Dr Brahmachari said.
The other related problem is that HIV patients, including children, have for long borne the brunt of this disease, especially with the emergence and spread of TB that is resistant to treatment with standard anti-TB drugs.
“For us the irony is that with the availability of drugs for HIV, and particularly of safe and affordable Indian generics, we are living with HIV but dying of TB,” Loon Gangte of the Delhi Network of Positive People, a support group of people living with HIV/AIDS, said.  “TB research has not seen much progress as we continued to live in a system that placed profits before people’s lives. India’s OSDD project holds immense hope for my community,” Gangte added.

Rashme Sehgal