The hunt for the new TB drug

If you have a few minutes this week then please do tune into the BBC World Service programme, Health Check. I have a feature about an innovative way of researching the next tuberculosis (TB) drug.

One of the major barriers in scientific research (as you might expect) is money. And that's particularly true for neglected diseases like malaria, typhoid and tuberculosis. In India alone, somewhere around a thousand people die of TB every day and yet there hasn't been a new drug to treat it for more than 40 years, because it's so expensive to develop and those who tend to have TB are so poor. So to get things moving, a team of scientists at the brilliant Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Delhi came up with the idea of pooling expert research from all around the world online - the project is known as the Open Source Drug Discovery network.

Thousands of scientists and graduate students have already got involved and they are quietly confident that this could eventually yield a new drug. IT companies have also offered their services for free, to create a good platform for understanding all the gigabytes of data they're collecting. It's a low-cost, fast way of doing research... so fingers crossed that it works.

The photo above was taken by Cristina de Middel, for the Medecins Sans Frontieres website.