In a path-breaking initiative that has the potential to revolutionalise the drug manufacturing sector, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on Monday launched its Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) programme with the aim of finding a cheap medicine for tuberculosis. The main objective of the initiative is to produce effective and cheap drugs for diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, which mainly afflict people in developing countries like India, through an alternative process that cannot be patented. The inspiration for an open source mechanism in drug discovery has come from the success of similar models in software, the most famous being the World Wide Web and Linux operating system, and in biotechnology, where the Human Genome Sequencing Project has come up on the same concept. CSIR Director-General Samir Kumar Brahmachari