Bathinda: The Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Natural Products and the Department of Pharmacology at the Central University of Punjab, in association with Schrodinger Inc. USA, are organising a three-day Hands-on Training Workshop on Molecular Modelling Techniques from May 3—5, 2023 under the AICTE SPICES scheme.
The inaugural ceremony of this workshop was held on Wednesday under the patronage of Vice-Chancellor Prof. Raghavendra P. Tiwari. On this occasion, Prof. P. V. Bharatam, NIPER, Mohali, participated as the Chief Guest. The distinguished guests on the programme were experts from Schrodinger, Inc.
The programme commenced with the welcome address by Prof. Raj Kumar, Dean, School of Health Sciences. He shed light on the programme theme and introduced the keynote speaker.
While addressing the participants, Prof. P.V. Bharatam delivered a lecture on "3D thinking in anti-cancer drug discovery". He stressed that three-dimensional thinking in drug discovery is important as various factors such as interaction between drug and molecule; chemical reaction; drug transportation process, signal transduction process, etc. happen to be in 3D. He highlighted that Pharmacoinformatics provides an opportunity for 3D perception. He stressed that Molecular Modelling (another name for pharmacoinformatics) is a 3D activity that provides additional information apart from experimental data, which helps the research to remove misconceptions and identify the success rate of a drug molecule. He discussed various technologies associated with 3D activity, such as Molecular Docking, virtual screening, De novo design, Chemoinformatics, Bioinformatics, Artificial Intelligence in Drug Design etc. He suggested that researchers always look for correlations of results between computational and experimental studies to validate their findings. Towards the end of the inaugural session, Dr. Suresh Thareja, AICTE-SPICES coordinator, delivered a formal vote of thanks.
Post inaugural lecture, participants learn about the foundation of drug discovery (molecular modelling) with an introductory presentation and hands-on training on Maestro GUI and Protein Preparation by Schrodinger, Inc. experts.
In the next two days, participants will be trained on Application of Ligand based drug discovery and Advanced Molecular Modelling. The valedictory ceremony of this workshop will be organised on 5th May, 2023.
More than 100 participants including research scholars and students from the Department of Pharmaceutical Science and Natural Products and the Department of Pharmacology at the Central University of Punjab are attending this workshop to enhance their skillset.