PROFESSOR KRISHNA N. GANESH

Mankind is in constant need of newer drugs (medicines) to overcome the resistance of known drugs to several diseases and tackle the emergence of new diseases. The process of drug discovery is a long and expensive process, involving 12-15 years and with a cost of more than $ 800 million per new drug put into market. The conventional drug discovery process involves screening of thousands of natural and synthetic compounds for a variety of biological activities along with rational structural design wherever relevant information of disease targets is available. Most of such targets are proteins or their complexes and the drugs are small molecules. Recently a new paradigm is emerging to design drugs against genes (DNA/RNA) rather than gene products (proteins), wherein the drug itself is an oligonucleotide (short piece of DNA/RNA) or its chemical analogue. With the sequencing of human genome and that of several pathogens, this approach has a great promise. This lecture aims to introduce the general drug discovery process and elaborate on the merits and challenges of the new genomic medicines, with some efforts in this direction from the speaker’s own laboratory.