Open Source Drug Discovery with the Malaria Box Compound Collection for Neglected Diseases and Beyond (original) (raw)

A major cause of the paucity of new starting points for drug discovery is the lack of interac- tion between academia and industry. Much of the global resource in biology is present in universities, whereas the focus of medicinal chemistry is still largely within industry. Open source drug discovery, with sharing of information, is clearly a first step towards overcoming this gap. But the interface could especially be bridged through a scale-up of open sharing of physical compounds, which would accelerate the finding of new starting points for drug discovery. The Medicines for Malaria Venture Malaria Box is a collection of over 400 com- pounds representing families of structures identified in phenotypic screens of pharmaceuti- cal and academic libraries against the Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasite. The set has now been distributed to almost 200 research groups globally in the last two years, with the only stipulation that information from the screens is deposited in the public ...