Biography
My area of Research: Computational Biology, Pharmaceutical sciences, Proteomics. Focus area : Molecular modeling & Drug Design.
The ability to design drugs effectively depends on the fundamental understanding of the structures of molecules and the biochemical interaction networks. The past decade has witnessed a paradigm shift in drug discovery with structure-based drug design playing a crucial role. The gap between the number of identified hits and actual drug candidates can be bridged by investigating the underlying interactions. A pool of information combining crystallographic structures and molecular modeling techniques permits to predict receptor 3D models of good quality. These models serve as a basis to establish and validate efficient rationales used to screen virtual libraries for obtaining hits. The most significant contribution is employing an integrated approach combining structure based drug design, systems biology and biological circuits to help in gaining synergy in drug design.
Currently the focus is in the following specific areas:
1. The role of drug design approaches with respect to two different classes of pharmaceutical targets has been studied.: (a) Plasmodium falciparum metalloaminopeptidases, promising targets for anti-malarial drug development. (b) G-protein coupled receptor- particularly orphan GPCRs reported to be predominantly expressed in pancreatic β –cells and a plausible target for treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus.
2. Pancreatic cancer remains unmanageable with a 5-year relative survival rate of <10%. The lack of measures for early diagnosis, strong resistance to chemotherapy, ineffective adjuvant chemotherapy and the unavailability of prognostic biomarkers are responsible for the high mortality rate of this deadly disease. The focus of the research is to study the detailed role of somatic mutations in pancreatic cancer and discover biomarkers for early diagnosis of the disease using a multi-omics strategy.
I have published more than 40 research papers in referred journals, successfully completed sponsored research projects from Department of Science &Technology and Department of Biotechnology, Govt, of India. I have supervised more than 30 students for their M.Tech and M.Sc dissertation and two students have been awarded PhD degree. I had earlier been associated as Honorary Research coordinator for Bioinformatics in Eicosanoid & Lipid Research Division, University Medical Centre, Berlin
Academics
PhD (2002), All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India