An International Conference on Challenges in Drug Discovery and Delivery (ICCD3) was organized by the Department of Pharmacy, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus. during 2-4 March 2017. Chandrashekar Ranga, Deputy Drugs Controller (India), New Delhi was the guest of honor, Ranga in his inaugural address enlightened the audience with the regulatory guidelines and various other developments in the pharma sector, including SUGAM portal for improving e- governance of IND applications. He also highlighted the grey areas of Indian Pharmaceutical Industry and pointed out the role of young researchers and students in overcoming the hurdles in the path of development.
The post lunch session was carried out as two parallel scientific sessions, which included talks by renowned speakers from all over the world and oral and poster presentations from researchers who had flocked from different parts of the country. S G Prasad, Ex Drugs Controller, Uttar Pradesh was also present on this occasion.
The first session was based on themes like Macromolecular Drug Delivery and RNA based Therapeutics and Molecular Modeling and in silico Drug Design. The other part of the session was covered by the talks on the importance of in silico techniques and their implications in treatment of neglected tropical diseases like Leishmaniasis and inflammatory diseases. Along with a detailed overview of the grave problems being faced by the scientific communities, these talks also showed different solutions which can be instrumental in conquering these fatal health issues.
The second part of the scientific session included talks by eminent scientists who talked about the current approaches in protein and peptide drug delivery in the treatment of vaccine development and treatment of COPD. The parallel arm of the scientific session was based on the theme, Chemoinformatics and Computational Drug Discovery which had some interesting discussions by well-known scientists .
The second day began with the theme entitled as Nanocarrier and Receptor mediated Drug Delivery. The scientists delivered interesting talks on application of nanotechnology to overcome drug resistance in cancer cells and liposomes to target drugs to a specific site so as to reduce the off target effects elicited by various drugs
Apart from this, over 165 posters which were based on current topics concerning the drug discovery and development. Researchers from all over the country participated in the event. The posters covered different topics ranging from in silico methods to in vivo and clinical studies, which are the different stages of drug development. The event showcased the extensive research going on throughout the country to tackle major health issues like cancer, diabetes, neurological complications etc and also highlighted the efforts of chemists working hard to develop efficient, side effect free molecules and formulation scientists who have been working continuously to convert the molecules into efficient formulations.
The conference also includes around 20 oral presentations spanning over three days. Young researchers from various parts of the country participated in oral presentations which included some brain storming discussion on various interesting studies on drug discovery and development and allowed the audience to get in touch with the recent research going on in different reputed laboratories of the country.