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A kernel for the Tropical Disease Initiative

Nature Biotechnology volume 27, pages 320–321 (2009)Cite this article

To the Editor:

Identifying proteins that are good drug targets and finding drug leads that bind to them is generally a challenging problem. It is particularly difficult for neglected tropical diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, where research resources are relatively scarce1. Fortunately, several developments improve our ability to deal with drug discovery for neglected diseases: first, the sequencing of many complete genomes of organisms that cause tropical diseases; second, the determination of a large number of protein structures; third, the creation of compound libraries, including already-approved drugs; and fourth, the availability of improved bioinformatics analysis, including methods for comparative protein structure modeling, binding site identification, virtual ligand screening and drug design. Therefore, we are now in a position to increase the odds of identifying high-quality drug targets and drug leads for neglected tropical diseases. Here we encourage a collaboration among scientists to engage in drug discovery for tropical diseases by providing a 'kernel' for the Tropical Disease Initiative (TDI, http://www.tropicaldisease.org/)2. As the Linux kernel did for open source code development, we suggest that the TDI kernel may help overcome a major stumbling block, in this case, for open source drug discovery: the absence of a critical mass of preexisting work that volunteers can build on incrementally.This kernel complements several other initiatives on neglected tropical diseases3,4,5, including collaborative web portals (e.g., http://www.thesynapticleap.org/), public-private partnerships (e.g., http://www.mmv.org/) and private foundations (e.g., http://www.gatesfoundation.org/); for an updated list of initiatives, see the TDI website above.

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Figure 1: TDI kernel snapshot of the web page for the Plasmodium falciparum thymidylate kinase target (http://tropicaldisease.org/kernel/q8i4s1/).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (BIO2007/66670 and SAF2008-01845), the National Institutes of Health (R01 GM54762, U54 GM074945, P01 AI035707, and P01 GM71790), and the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation.

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Author notes

  1. Narayanan Eswar

    Present address: Present address: DuPont Knowledge Center, Hyderabad, India. mmarti@cipf.es sali@salilab.org,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bioinformatics and Genomics Department, Structural Genomics Unit, Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe, Valencia, Spain

    Leticia Ortí & Marc A Marti-Renom

  2. Medicinal Chemistry Department, Structural Biology Laboratory, Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe, Valencia, Spain

    Leticia Ortí, Rodrigo J Carbajo & Antonio Pineda-Lucena

  3. Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA

    Ursula Pieper, Narayanan Eswar & Andrej Sali

  4. University of Southern California, Gould School of Law, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Stephen M Maurer

  5. School of Law, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Arti K Rai

  6. The Synaptic Leap, San Ramon, California, USA

    Ginger Taylor

  7. School of Chemistry, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Matthew H Todd

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Ortí, L., Carbajo, R., Pieper, U. et al. A kernel for the Tropical Disease Initiative. Nat Biotechnol 27, 320–321 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0409-320

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