Seminar on Drug Discovery & Development: Where India stands?

You are cordially invited to attend the seminar.

Abstract

Drug Discovery & Development: Where India stands?

 

Ajay Singh
Drug Discovery Research
Panacea Biotec Limited

Mohali

 

India aims to be innovative country by 2020. To be an innovation driven economy, India has to be focused on developing and nurturing scientific temperament in all the frontiers of science & technology. Innovation centric approaches in science, medicine & engineering will help us in realizing this goal. In a country like India with huge population, healthcare is going to be a one of the challenging area in near future. Indian pharmaceutical and biotechnology fraternity has to shift the focus from generic to innovation based therapeutic interventions. We need to understand complete Drug Discovery & Development process, and design strategies & policies to foster innovation in this process. It requires a multidisciplinary expertise & infrastructure. The drug discovery process initiates with target identification & validation, followed by medicinal chemistry & rational drug designing, medium throughput screening, and lead generation. The complete biological profiling of lead molecules culminates into lead optimization followed by candidate prioritization and selection. Selected drug candidate undergoes safety profiling in invitro & in-vivo regulatory toxicity studies including short & long term studies. This completes preclinical development of an innovator drug molecule and it enters Clinical Development (testing of drug in humans; Phase I, II, III & IV). However, this process is laden on with two important factors: Time (10-15 years) and Cost ($1.5 billion) to develop an innovator drug for worldwide use.

Dr. Ajay Singh is a Senior Scientist (Discovery Biology), Drug Discovery Research at the Panacea Biotec Limited, Mohali. He earned his PhD degree in Biochemistry at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, in 2006. For his graduate thesis research, he investigated the molecular mechanisms involved in regulation of cell cycle in Candida albicans, in particular the role cAMP signaling pathway. He did his postdoctoral research at the Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked on diverse aspects of prion diseases. He joined his current poistion in January 2012. At Panacea Biotec, he is working on small molecule (NCE) drug discovery and development (metabolic disorders, central nervous system disorders, and infectious diseases). Dr. Singh has about 8 years of research experience and has published 16 research articles in peer-reviewed international journals