Challenges in Drug Discovery
Despite major breakthroughs and tremendous progress in the field of bio-medicine, the designing and discovering a new drug molecule is remains a challenging task. Drug discovery and development is a costly, time consuming and laborious process that requires approximately US$800 million and 10-15 years to bringing a new drug into the market through passing various phases. But the success rate is very low, so it is important to initiate open source concept in the drug discovery field. OSDD is a CSIR led team India Consortium with global partnership with a vision to provide affordable healthcare to the developing world by providing a global platform where the best minds can collaborate & collectively endeavor to solve the complex problems associated with discovering novel therapies for neglected tropical diseases like Malaria, Tuberculosis, Leshmaniasis, etc. It provides single platform for drug discovery, bringing together researchers, wet lab scientists, research organizations, clinicians, and students.The principal of OSDD is the "Collaborate, Discover & Share" and moto is "affordable health care for all". Computational Resources for Drug Discovery (CRDD) is an important module of the in silico module of OSDD. The CRDD web portal provides computer resources related to drug discovery on a single platform. The main focus of CRDD is the provides computational resources for researchers in the field of computer-aided drug design, provides various webservers and software related to in silico drug designing, developing biological databases related to medicine and collecting and compiling various important resources for in silico drug designing. In silico tools and techniques providing an alternative for reducing cost and time in drug discovery during various experimetal phases. The computational methods for in silico drug discovery have been broadly divided into two fields bioinformatics and cheminformatics. Cheminformatics and other in silico tools related to computer-aided drug are dominated by proprietary or commercial companies where these tools are costly with stringent license conditions. Due to heavy cost of chemoinformatics resources, computer-aided drug discovery is still a costly affair. So the OSDD-Linux including the popular open source softwares in bioinformatics and cheminformatics on a single platform to help researches and students in field of drug designing. OSDD-Linux is a customized flavour of linux, which is dedicated for the users belongs to the field of bioinformatics and chemoinformatics. This OS developed at Ubuntu platform integrated with various webservices, command line version and galaxy version of vaious tools developed under the roof of OSDD from Dr. Raghava's group. Attractive features of OSDD-Linux:
OSDDLinux, in its current plenitude and pliability, is intended to serve atleast five types of users.
Open source OSDD initiative
Computational Resources for Drug Discovery
Challenges in developing in-silico tools for Drug Discovery
OSDD-Linux
1. Occassional users who often need bioinformatics and cheminformatics tools but wish to keep the tool package as a separate entity from their system. For such cases, OSDDLinux has been made bootable and operable from an external memory device like CD/DVD or USB.
2. Regular users for whom the integration of the tool package with their local system would be a big advantage for analyzing bulk data offline.
3. Windows users desirous of using bioinformatics and cheminformatics tools on linux simultaneously with windows system. OSDDLinux can be used on virtual desktop using VMware, Virtual Box, etc. alongside the activities on windows.
4. Regular Ubuntu users already working in the unix environment who wish to install OSDDLinux bioinformatics and cheminformatics tools in their own Ubuntu version. The informatics tools in OSDDLinux have been made available for download from the OSDDLinux portal.
5. Developers who would like to enhance or customize OSDDLinux for their own needs or new applications have been entertained by providing access to the source code.
