Sanskriti University School of Pharmacy recently organised a seminar on 'Drug Repurposing and Applications of QSAR in Drug Discovery.' Dr Anshuman Dixit, Scientist-E (Institute of Life Sciences) was a key speaker of the seminar. The seminar was aimed to familiarise students with the application of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) in Drug Discovery. The seminar was attended by Chancellor Sachin Gupta, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Rakesh Premi, Faculty Members and students of the School of Pharmacy.

During his inaugural speech, Dr Anshuman Dixit said, “Repurposing or repositioning refers to the usage of pre-existing drugs to tackle a disease other than the one that the drug was originally designed to target."

Dr Dixit also shared detailed information on the conventional drug development process involving de novo detection and identification of new molecular entities, including the five phases, discovery and pre-clinical, safety review, clinical research, FDA review and FDA post-market safety monitoring. It is a time-consuming and expensive procedure with a high risk of failure as highlighted briefly before, while on the other hand, the drug repositioning has only four steps, including (a) compound identification; (b) compound acquisition; (c) development; and (d) FDA post-market safety monitoring. The development of next-generation computational methods using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and network medicine approaches have positively impacted the different stages of a drug development process.

The increasing use of IT in the discovery of new molecular entities encourages the use of modern molecular-modelling tools to help teach important concepts of drug design to chemistry and pharmacy undergraduate students, said Sachin Gupta, Chancellor of Sanskriti University.

The seminar culminated with a vote of Thanks by Pro Vice-Chancellor Rakesh Premi.