Researchers working on new drugs involving investment of billions of dollars are opting for computer-aided drug and molecular designs to save time and money, experts in the field said here.

The drug discovery process, which took 14 years or more involving billions of dollars per molecule, also confronted a high failure rate which required a rational drug design procedure to overcome this impediment, Dr Rajamohan Reddy Poondra, Principal Research Scientist at Dr. Reddy’s Institute of Life Sciences (DRILS), Hyderabad, said.

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Narrating his experience, Dr. Reddy said that researchers at DRILS had developed ‘Ragaglitazar’, a drug which had shown significant properties and great potential to treat type 2 diabetes.

“It had progressed well and during its phase three clinical trials on mice, toxicities were observed in one animal which led to the entire trial being scrapped,” he said.

Dr Reddy was speaking at a symposium on ‘Rational Drug Design’ at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (SPS), faculty of pharmaceutical sciences of SOA (Deemed to be University).

Dr. Anshuman Dixit, Scientist at the Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), Bhubaneswar and Dr. Badreenath Konkimalla, Scientist at the National Institute of Science, Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar also spoke in different sessions of the workshop which was chaired by Prof. S.C.Si, Dean of SPS.

Dr. Dixit said the different approaches adopted for drug research included Computer Aided Drug Design (CADD), Computer Assisted Molecular Design (CAMD), Virtual Data Base Screening and Structure Based Design besides docking studies, robotics, high throughput screening and bioinformatics.

These approaches were resorted to expedite the drug discovery process with minimum chance of failure during different phases of the research and marketing of a new drug due to issues surrounding toxicity, he said.

Rational drug design helped in identification of pharmacophore (active drug moiety), identification of targets and evaluation of safety and toxicity profile which was done prior to actual screening of drugs in animals and human beings to save time and money, Prof. Pratap Kumar Sahu of SPS said. Several drugs including Captropril (to treat hypertension), Dorzolamide (glaucoma) and Nelfinavir (HIV/AIDS) had been developed using such approach, he said.