Kal Ramnarayan
Sapient Discovery, LLC, USA
Title: Can novel small molecules entities be discovered that could be developed into drugs utilizing protein structure prediction and computational chemistry techniques?
Biography
Biography: Kal Ramnarayan
Abstract
Drug discovery has evolved from serendipity to rational design to high throughput screening to focused screening. Success and failures in each of these approaches could be extracted from literature as well as from the number of drugs in the “pipeline†of Pharma companies. It is hard to pinpoint any single reason as the root cause of failure of compounds at the safety studies stage or at clinical studies stage. Each of these methods have their merits and in this era of tight research budgets as well as the lack of venture/angel funding for “Discovery†projects one has to adapt the best practices to enhance success and prove druggability very early on. At Sapient Discovery we use computer derived methods to design molecules that have lower attrition rate by adapting “Target class†approach in combination with focused screening and enhanced drug-like filtering of “hits†prior to actual biological assays. Our technology “Genes to Leads†has been applied to over 30 targets and has resulted in compounds making to clinic and preclinical stage. We will outline our methodology and show our successes.