William Scott PhD, research Professor (left) and Martin J. O'Donnell PhD, IUPUI Chancellor's Professor (right) both of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at IUPUI in the Journal of Combinatorial Chemistry, note that even in times of economic prosperity, the pharmaceutical industry has been reluctant to get involved in developing treatments for diseases that occur primarily in low income countries. Apart from the five already mentioned, these include Human African trypanosomiasis, Lymphatic filariasis  Onchocerciasis, Schistosomiasis, Soil transmitted helmithiasis, and Yaws

The low cost of their D3 approach, involving distributed global educational resources at the early stage of discovery, is even more attractive in global economic downturn.

A distributed problem solving process breaks large problems into small pieces  "distributed" to multiple, small, low-cost sites to obtain a solution. For decades astronomers enlisted  public help, asking individuals world-wide to leave home computers on overnight. Each looks for patterns in a small subset of the incredibly large amount of space noise signals received by arrays of sky scanning radio telescopes.

D3 uses a similar distributed problem approach at all three key stages of drug discovery. In identifying candidate drug molecules the researchers are soliciting the global advice of computational experts in neglected disease areas and using the computational power of multiple personal computers around the world to scan the almost infinite number of molecules which the D3 synthesis process could make to identify the smaller number of drug candidate molecules they should make. Drs Scott and O'Donnell believe this will lead to selection, synthesis and development of innovative, inexpensive drugs to treat these neglected diseases.

The second step D3 uses an distributed educational approach to synthesise  candidate molecules. Undergraduate and graduate chemistry students from around the world synthesise subsets of these candidate molecules as part of their normal training in synthetic chemistry.

Currently students at IUPUI, University of Indianapolis, and Universities in Poland, Russia and Spain have demonstrated their ability to make molecules (or portions of the molecules) that can be identified by personal computers as potential candidates for drug discovery.

Initial results are very promising, according to Dr. Scott. "While learning chemistry synthesis skills students across the globe synthesize new molecules to be tested as drug leads. The molecules meet the same quality standards as those required in industry. At the same time the students enthusiastically participate in the synthesis laboratories. They enjoy seeing how their work will advance science that is going to make a difference to individuals suffering from diseases which have been ignored."

The third step of D3 is biological testing molecules synthesised by  students. Drs Scott and O'Donnell hope distributed problem solving at computational and synthetic stages of drug discovery will encourage their biological colleagues to develop simple, inexpensive tests to enable students worldwide to participate in this final stage of drug-lead discovery.

Currently some molecules made are being evaluated through the resources of the National Institutes of Health. In the future, promising drugs will then go on to pre-clinical trials.

"The coordinated and recombined results of these distributed D3 resources can economically accelerate the identification of leads in the early stages of the drug discovery process. Simultaneously, this effort provides educational and job opportunities in both the developed and developing worlds, while building cultural and economic bridges for the common good," Drs Scott and O'Donnell wrote in a perspective article.

The studies on D3  were funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, and Lilly Research Laboratories.

Drs Scott and O'Donnell continue to enlist chemistry departments in the United States and other parts of the globe in this program to help children and adults with devastating diseases which have been largely ignored by the developed world.