Development of a TB drug pipeline is essential after decades of apathy. There are still far too few compounds that represent new chemical classes with novel mechanisms of action and a low probability of encountering drug resistance.

The market size has been a major driving force for new drug discovery programs in major pharmaceutical companies. It has been roughly estimated that the discovery and development
of a new drug costs approximately between US$ 250-800 million and takes about 12 years. Although the big pharmaceutical companies have made commendable contribution to the
 discovery of drugs for several diseases yet the initiatives for the discovery and development
 of drugs for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis are lacking.

The prohibitive cost of Intellectual Property protection and maintenance, and the confidentiality of drug development do not allow collective efforts of the best brains of the world at national laboratories and academic institutions to work together with industry.

Solving the bottlenecks at early stages of drug discovery like target identification, target validation, etc is key to finding novel drugs for TB. Only availability of rigorously validated targets and lead compounds that inhibit them could mitigate the risks of pharmaceutical companies in bringing such drugs to the market. OSDD aims to provide a platform for knowledge sharing and collaborative research leading to identification of novel drug targets. This global collaborative effort is expected to reduce the time expended in conventional drug discovery process.

A decentralized, web based, community wide effort where students, scientists from different laboratories, universities, institutes and corporations could work together for a common cause could bring down the cost of drug discovery by knowledge sharing and collaborations. The OSDD process of discovery of new chemical entities will be in the public domain. The new chemical entities will be made available for public good as soon as they are discovered.