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Online industry networks could develop pharmaceutical products using open source principles. The Tropical Diseases Initiative is an example of an “open source” online network developing drugs for tropical diseases. It operates in a niche that is uneconomic or unviable for the pharmaceutical industry. It has been allowed to survive as a result. It demonstrates the potential of online networks in the pharmaceutical industry. A description of the Tropical Disease Initiative is provided below.

Tropical Diseases Initiative - Extract

Only about 1% of newly developed drugs are for tropical diseases, such as African sleeping sickness, dengue fever, and leishmaniasis. While patent incentives and commercial pharmaceutical houses have made Western health care the envy of the world, the commercial model only works if companies can sell enough patented products to cover their research and development (R&D) costs. The model fails in the developing world, where few patients can afford to pay patented prices for drugs.

It is easy (and correct) to say that Western governments could solve this problem by paying existing institutions to focus on cures for tropical diseases. But sadly, there is not enough political will for this to happen. In any case, grants and patent incentives were never designed with tropical diseases in mind.

Two main kinds of proposals have been suggested for tackling the problem. The first is to ask sponsors governments and charitiesto subsidize developing-country purchases at a guaranteed price. In the second approach, charities create nonprofit venture-capital firms (Virtual Pharmas), which look for promising drug candidates and then push drug development through contracts with corporate partners. In this article, we discussed the problems with these two approaches and suggest a third, open source, approach to drug development, called the Tropical Diseases Initiative (TDI). We envisage TDI as a decentralized, Web-based, community-wide effort where scientists from laboratories, universities, institutes, and corporations can work together for a common cause.