Drug Discovery

Industry Challenges

• Drug discovery forms the first crucial steps of designing a drug molecule. Technology plays a paramount role here. Meeting these requirements is a challenging task
• The challenge of drug discovery is not only to find the best molecule but also to filter out bad candidate molecules that might fail further down in drug design pipeline. Such molecules when fail encore substantial financial drain onto the entire drug design process. Hence the challenge and the direction are to fail fast and fail early
• The effort of designing novel molecule requires specialized knowledge spread across multi disciplinary studies such as pharmacogenomics, chemistry, biology, and immunology. With such challenges Human Resource Management becomes pivotal
• Given the vast amount of data processing and computational rigor required at discovery stage, high performance bio-computing as well as in-silico tools and technology implementations are also required
• Post patent approval the innovator has a window of 10 - 15 years to enjoy exclusivity over the drug in the market. Once the drug goes off patent it enters the generic market
• Reducing time to market and increasing ROI on R&D among the other of the drug discovery process

Service Offerings

HCL's focus is on target validation by providing in-silico methods for Gene to Drug by using algorithms & software tools. Our drug discovery centre is a dedicated, validated ODC that undertakes R&D support projects. The R&D work for drug delivery is conducted at in-silico Labs, a Centre of Excellence under the Life Science Practice.

This CoE possesses cutting edge skills in bioinformatics, Net2JEE and PGx-CT. It has gene-to-drug algorithms, tools and frameworks that enable it to undertake cutting-edge Pharmaceutical R&D work. Projects such as 3DQSAR, Bio Explorer and MDI Bio-Server have been conducted by the InSilico Labs. HCL also has implementation experience in linking Biocomputing resources across India.

HCL's services in the Drug Discovery value chain are as follows:

• Virtual/Synthesized Customized Lead Library
  The service deliverables would include creation of virtual/chemical synthesis and invitro tested customized drug libraries.
• Drug Design Components
  • Virtual High Throughput screening
  • Protein Ligand Binding studies
  • Protein Ligand Complex analysis
  • Ab initio Molecular Design
• Genome Analysis
• Structure prediction & proteomics simulations (tools & algorithms)
  HCL's proprietary formats for drug discovery are:
  • ChemGenome – A Gene Prediction Algorithm
  • Bhageerath - Protein Structure Prediction Algorithm
  • Sanjeevini - Lead Identification Algorithm
  • Panax Finder - 3DQSAR Tool for Drug Design
  • Bio Grid -Distributed computing platform setup for running computationally intensive algorithms (C & D)

HCL's gene-to-drug approach attempts to identify the gene and non-gene of a genome, converts the coding art of the genome to a protein, predicts the 3-D tertiary structure of the protein, finds the active site of the protein and finally generates a lead molecule for the protein in a single window. It is a Web-based application that provides a end-to-end solution, right from gene identification and protein structure prediction to active site directed lead design.

HCL Differentiators

• In Depth understanding of science & technology behind in-silico algorithms and tool
• Indigenously developed suite of algorithm providing greater flexibility when it comes to customization
• Industry-specific Alliances, Partnerships and Forums
• Expertise in High Performance Biocomputing environment
  • Creation
  • Management
  • Application development
  • Porting and customization of applications
  • MPI, Cluster tools and their implementations
• Partnership with SCFBio
  Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, IIT Delhi is a premier Computational Biology facility of India. SCFBio has developed methodologies for genome analysis, protein structure prediction, and drug design. The methodologies have been widely acknowledged by the global scientific community. The center is created with a vision of integrating High Performance Biocomputing across the country with SCFBio being the nodal center.
• Partnership with Lead Invent Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
  Lead Invent is a knowledge based company, providing R&D solutions in Life Sciences discovery space encapsulating genomics, proteomics and drug design. Lead Invent is dedicated towards discovering viable therapeutic lead molecules against biological targets.