Lori Mehen, an account manager at Red Hat, writes in opensource.com that the future of pharma is open source--particularly when it comes to drug development for the developing world. She mentions, in particular, tuberculosis and malaria, which continue to kill in large numbers in the developing world, but for which big pharma does not have much of an interest in developing drugs, Mehen asserts. "The current approach to drug development takes too long, costs too much, and is too unpredictable for pharma to invest in small to non-existent commercial markets. So for diseases like these, open source drug development has become one of the most promising avenues and we're finding more who seem to agree." Among other efforts, she cites the Open Source Drug Discovery Network, which has established a 2,000-plus member open source platform for both computational and experimental technologies. More from Mehen l Open Source Drug Discovery Network