What are the disease targets of OSDD?
Tuberculosis (TB) is a ravaging dreaded disease killing one person in every 1.5 minutes in India. Nearly 2 billion people are infected, i.e., 1 in 3 of global population. 8.9 million new cases have been reported in 2004 of which 80% are from the 22 high-burden countries alone. Global incidence of TB is increasing by 0.6% per annum. (Ref: WHO Global Report, 2006). An estimated 370,000 deaths due to TB occur each year. This amounts to over 1000 deaths a day or 2 deaths every 3 minutes (Gopi P et al (TRC), IJMR, Sep 2005). TB is the leading cause of death from bacterial infection, it is spread person to person, and is a particular threat for nosocomial transmission, with a potentially lethal impact on health care workers. For life-style diseases, pharmaceutical companies actively scout advances in basic research on search of new and potentially lucrative drug targets. For TB, this is not the case. Early stage drug discovery is a key bottleneck in the pipeline to find novel drugs for TB. T
