Kal Ramnarayan
President and Chief Scientific Officer Sapient Discovery USA
Title: Accelerated and Reliable Lead Discovery: Structure guided drug discovery ideal for collaborative projects.
Biography
Biography: Kal Ramnarayan
Abstract
With the goal of saving costs and time, the trend now is to outsource crucial components of drug discovery. While this seems to work in labor-intensive tasks such as chemical synthesis, GMP manufacturing, animal studies and clinical work, it is not always easy to find outfits for lead discovery with reliable and proven capabilities. This is becoming an important need for Pharma and Biotech companies since there are still large numbers of protein targets involved with several disease classes yet to be exploited. The abundance of potential drug targets is a challenge for the pharmaceutical and biotech companies that have to focus their resources. At least 50% of all targets that go into high-throughput screens do not generate significant leads and hence other cost-effective technologies are required to generate novel, patentable lead molecules. We have developed a structure-based approach to develop lead molecules in 60 to 90 days, which has resulted in validated lead molecules for a diverse set of drug targets. We utilize this lead generation technology, Genes to Leads®, in collaborative drug discovery project with universities, Pharma and Biotech companies as a highly costeffective means for augmenting their drug discovery pipelines. Essential ingredients of the technology are, X-ray crystallography, protein modeling, virtual screening, docking and scoring. In this presentation we will discuss our technology with specific application examples.