Seminar on drug design concludes

JORHAT, Dec 20: The North East Institute of Science and Technology, organized a day-long international seminar on Molecular Modelling and Drug Design jointly with Schrodinger, USA, here recently. The seminar included lectures on structure and ligand-based drug design.

Dr R Raghu, Director, Business Development, Schrodinger, USA spoke about the computer aided drug design and recent developments in modelling of GPCRs.

Devleena Shivakumar from Schrodinger talked about induced fit docking and gave demonstration on structure based virtual screening on HMG CoA Reductase.

Other speaker included Dr Ravi who spoke about recent advances in cheminformatics methods, novel methods for generating structure based pharmacophores and also gave a demonstration on ligand-based virtual screening.

The seminar also included a session of panel discussion. The seminar is envisioned to benefit the researchers and scientific community in the field of new drug discovery and development. Earlier in the day, the inaugural session was chaired by Dr PG Rao, Director, NEIST. Dr RC Boruah, Scientist ‘G’, NEIST and Coordinator of the programme welcomed the participants comprising of the scientists and researchers from NEIST and faculties from Dibrugarh University, IASST- Guwahati, NEHU- Shillong, TRA- Jorhat and Assam Agriculture University- Jorhat.

Dr Raghu briefed the participants about the topics and area to be covered under the seminar.

In his speech, Dr Rao said that NEIST at present was working on several promising new molecules which were at different stages of development. He also mentioned that this was not the first time that NEIST was going to work in the field of computational chemistry. In the formative years of the laboratory, it also had collaboration with German team under DAAD programme. The drug development, as such takes quite a long time to arrive at the final product but the application software would help reduce the time period of discovery, he opined. He also said that Northeast was rich in medicinal plants and traditional knowledge and now it was necessary to take this knowledge to formal drug designing for the benefit of the society.

The inauguration session concluded with vote of thanks by Dr PK Choudhury, Scientist ‘F’, NEIST. THE SENTINEL