Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment

The Synaptic Leap (TSL) is an open source online biomedical research community that was launched in November of 2005 in partnership with the Tropical Disease Initiative. TSL’s mission is to facilitate a network of online communities that enable scientists to collaborate with one another and share their research on tropical diseases. Since there is a lower traditional profit incentive for R&D for tropical disease, these diseases are good candidates for open source research as there is a lesser motivation to keep information private. TSL currently features research communities devoted to malaria, schistosomiasis, toxoplasma and tuberculosis. An on-going project of the forum is creating a lower cost drug for Schistosomiasis.