India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research is taking a cue from open source initiatives that you and I know so well and applying those same ideals to third world drug research in the hopes of developing cures for diseases "at a fraction of the costs incurred by multinationals to develop a new drug."

The idea is pretty simple. Knowledge and data about diseases will be kept online where "researchers and experts would then be encouraged to come forward and solve specific problems." Plausible ideas would then be given to various research organizations (in India, where clinical research costs are low) for further testing. Any drug that eventually gets developed would essentially "become a low-cost generic from day one."

Open source drug discovery [Economic Times]