Nowadays the mutations in pathogens, especially in viruses, have an exponential rate. With the advancements of science and technology, there have been faster and time-bound ways to discover the drugs against any specific pathogen. To be precise we can target the specific protein of the pathogen which is responsible for its survival and mutation. One such discovery of the automated tool to design and discover drugs against pathogens has been done which is named Dhanvantari. Dhanvantari is my thesis research work which embarks the way towards drug discovery from genome information of a pathogen. It is one of the kind drug discovery tools which can fetch all the information required for drug discovery just from the genome sequence of the pathogen. It is a freeware and available on the url: http://www.scfbio-iitd.res.in/software/dhanvantari_new/Home.html
One success story of the software is recently published in The FEBS Journal (DOI: 10.1111/FEBS.14707) where I have utilized the tool for discovering three generic picornavirus drugs which showed promising inhibitory effect on the proteases of the viral family. It is indeed an achievement to design such generic drugs when the whole world is facing drug resistance against viruses and bacteria.
Another success story of the software is against the Hepatitis B Virus where I identified two molecules which can kill the virus by inhibiting the normal functioning of three of its major proteins namely HBeAg, HBcAg and HBsAg. The inhibition of HBsAg also ensures the malfunctioning of large and middle surface proteins. The virus, in general, requires seven proteins for its normal functioning and five of them are affected by these two molecules.
My research work focuses on designing new drugs against viruses which can kill the virus in two ways. One by making a generic drug against all similar functioning proteins and other way is to design a multi-targeting drug which ensures that the virus is killed due to the multi-level effect of the medicine on it. Both ways lead to the promising way of discovering drugs with no or very less failure rate. Along with this, I created this automated pipeline Dhanvantari for use by other researchers in the drug discovery community.
In today's world where drug discovery takes about 14-15 years and US$ 2.6, Dhanvantari shall be a boon in faster and economical way of identifying newer drugs against pathogens. It takes 24 hrs to get a list of lead molecules against any pathogen from the protocol in its current version. With two recent success stories, I am hopeful that with more advancement and robustness added to the protocol it can take the discovery of new medicines to the next level.
One success story of the software is recently published in The FEBS Journal (DOI: 10.1111/FEBS.14707) where I have utilized the tool for discovering three generic picornavirus drugs which showed promising inhibitory effect on the proteases of the viral family. It is indeed an achievement to design such generic drugs when the whole world is facing drug resistance against viruses and bacteria.
Another success story of the software is against the Hepatitis B Virus where I identified two molecules which can kill the virus by inhibiting the normal functioning of three of its major proteins namely HBeAg, HBcAg and HBsAg. The inhibition of HBsAg also ensures the malfunctioning of large and middle surface proteins. The virus, in general, requires seven proteins for its normal functioning and five of them are affected by these two molecules.
My research work focuses on designing new drugs against viruses which can kill the virus in two ways. One by making a generic drug against all similar functioning proteins and other way is to design a multi-targeting drug which ensures that the virus is killed due to the multi-level effect of the medicine on it. Both ways lead to the promising way of discovering drugs with no or very less failure rate. Along with this, I created this automated pipeline Dhanvantari for use by other researchers in the drug discovery community.
In today's world where drug discovery takes about 14-15 years and US$ 2.6, Dhanvantari shall be a boon in faster and economical way of identifying newer drugs against pathogens. It takes 24 hrs to get a list of lead molecules against any pathogen from the protocol in its current version. With two recent success stories, I am hopeful that with more advancement and robustness added to the protocol it can take the discovery of new medicines to the next level.
