Open Source Project Looks for Better TB Treatments

We've written before about pharmaceutical companies using open source principles to further drug research. Now that same approach is being used to map the biological and genetic information contained in the deadly genes responsible for tuberculosis (TB).

India's Open Source Drug Discovery(OSDD) collective is the driving force behind the Connect 2 Decode project that aims to pool research data and create a central repository accessible by any one organization in the world that's doing TB research of its own.

More than 1.7 million people die from tuberculosis each year, and the virus is growing increasingly resistant to existing drugs. The gene research will hopefully lead to better medicines and vaccines that haven't been improved since they were first developed in the 1960's.