Novartis recognises that there is an urgent need to find new medicines for diseases like TB that are ravaging developing countries. The NITD's goal is to apply new genomics and bioinformatics technologies to develop novel treatments for multi-drug resistant TB.
 

Any resulting drugs will be available without royalties in those developing countries where the disease is endemic.
 

NITD researchers plans to take advantage of the genome sequence of the M tuberculosis which has been available for over three years. Every piece of information of what makes this bacterium tick is contained within this sequence. The challenge is to use this newly gained knowledge to identify vulnerable parts of the organism that could be targeted by small molecules. Those small molecules can then be further refined to produce clinical drug candidates.
 

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