The Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) will soon license out six candidate drugs to the industry and has increased its total number of overseas patents filed to 52, including over 20 domestic patents.
The candidate drugs open for licensing include an anti-osteoporosis compound 99/373, an osteogenic Plant NP-1, two antihyperglycemic compounds S-002-853 & 857, and two antihyperglycemics CDR 134-F 194 & CDR 267 F 018, according to Dr. Zaka Imam, Deputy Director, CDRI.
Presenting an overview of discovery to development of new pharmaceutical drugs in CDRI/CSIR at the ‘Drug Discovery to Clinical Trials’ international exhibition and conference organised by IBC Asia in Mumbai, he said 12 out of the 17 new drugs developed in the country were discovered or developed by CDRI and related institutions and four products are already in the market. Hindustan Latex markets Centchroman, a non-steroidal oral contraceptive developed by CDRI under the trade name Saheli and by Torrent with the brand name Sevista. Arteether, an anti-malarial, is marketed by Themis Medicare with the brand name E-Mal and an anti-relapse anti-malarial Elubaquin is marketed by Nicholas Piramal India under the trade name Aablaquin. A memory enhancer developed by the Institute is marketed by Lumin Marketing company, Chennai under the trade name Promind/Memory Power/Memory Perfect.
He said CSIR has 38 labs and 39 field stations spread across India and is among the largest publicly funded R&D organisations in the world, manned by 8000 scientists/engineers and 10,000 technical support staff. The National Sub-commission on Macroeconomics and Health has identified 17 disease areas constituting major disease burden for the country and CDRI has prioritized 7 areas for drug research and development. These are fertility regulation, cerebral stroke, hypertension, cancers, tuberculosis, vector borne diseases like malaria, Kala-azar and lymphatic filariasis and mental diseases. Traditional medicine research has been among the mainstay of R&D work at CDRI.
About 20 CSIR labs, 13 universities and three traditional medicine institutes have been networked for screening of traditional preparations, plants, fungi, microbes and insect agents in 14 disease areas and various remedies are being validated. A mission programme has been launched for development of an anti-asthmatic drug to leverage the existing expertise in asthma, allergies and their T-cell epitopes and following the success of herbal drug Asmon developed by IICB. Efforts are also on to identify and characterize differentially expressed genes and proteins of selected pathogenic organisms including Mycobacterium tuberculosis and plasmodium falciparum. Development of drug targets using in-silico biology, design of new software to enable identification of therapeutic targets, development of new tools for predicting toxicity and drug response in silico etc. are some of the ongoing activities in the field.
He said under the New Millennium India Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI), CDRI has been able to achieve substantial achievements in collaboration with CSIR and other institutions in developing drugs in select niche areas. Development of a diagnostic kit for cancer, oral herbal formulation for treatment of psoriasis, development of lysostaphin, gene based markers and new targets for cancer of head, neck, gall bladder and brain (glioma) and a new TB molecule Sudoterb has been discovered after 60 years since the last new molecule was discovered.