Piramal Life, Biotech Dept start Phase 2 of drug project

A Central Government Department and Piramal Life Sciences (PLSL) have launched Phase II of their joint project to find new drugs from 14,000 bioactive cultures discovered in a nationwide search.

These bioactives are from biodiverse habitats located across the country and were discovered in collaboration with nine national institutes, a PLSL release said today.

The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and PLSL have entered into Drug Discovery Public Private Partnership.

Underthe programme, jointly funded by DBT and PLSL, a total of 2,45,000 different microbes were collected. Extracts from these microbes were screened for biological activities across four different therapeutic areas namely cancer, diabetes, inflammation and infectious diseases, it said.

Based on results of these studies, a team of experts has identified over 14,000 cultures that showed potent activities in the aforementioned disease conditions.

These cultures are in the process of classification and storage in a national repository created by DBT at the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS). This enormous database is a starting point for the isolation of novel scaffolds that may be useful for developing drugs, it said.

The second phase of the programme will identify and characterise the chemical entity which is responsible for the bioactivity described for the extracts, the release said.

With the integration of high-end technology platforms both in biology and chemistry, rapidity in isolation has been achieved, and 1000 extracts of the 14000 will be evaluated within the next one and half years to obtain lead molecules, PLSL added.