The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has now certified Bangalore's Jalaja Technologies to market PLHOST, a bio-informatics software used for identification of potential drug targets to provide a drug screen for broad-spectrum antibacterial and for specific infection diagnosis.

PLHOST (Peptide Library based Homology Search Tool Fast Alignment) is India's first indigenous version that is patented in the US and installed recently at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Edu-Tech Information, New Delhi and Pune University.

The application was developed at G N Ramachandran Lab of the Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology (IGIB), an affiliate of CSIR.

It for the first time that a private organization is given the rights to market a CSIR/IGIB bio-informatics, Raja Seevan, director, Jalaja Technologies told Pharmabiz.com. "PLHOST is integrated with Peoples" Linux, a Linux distribution from Jalaja Technologies which gives a platform for using a plethora of scientific and engineering applications," he added.

Several research centres across the country including Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Institute of Bioinformatics along with Hyderabad's GVK Biosciences, Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) and the Centre for Cell and Molecular Biology (CCMB) have also evinced interest in the product. Talks are on with pharmaceutical companies including Nicholas Piramal, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Ocimum Biosolutions for its installation, Raja Seevan Said.

The department of Biotechnology (DBT), government of India will also be using PLHOST for all its institutions in the country as a total solutions provider. The display model available at its premises in Bangalore is being accessed by students of Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology, Bangalore.

PLHOST operates on People's Linux Desktop with Bio R&D tools that is integrated with a workstation and provided to users as a total solution. "All that the scientists need to do is to plug and play. People Linux is the first Indian system, which is user friendly and easy to migrate on other operating systems," said Raja Seevan.

The product is available for the research-academic institutes for Rs. 97,500 (32-bit configuration) and Rs. 1.57 lakh (64-bit configuration) only for the first 50 licenses. The prices for pharmaceutical companies are Rs. 2 lakh (32-bit) and Rs. 3 lakh (64-bit). The price variation is mainly because CSIR intends to offer the software at an affordable price for Indian research centres through DBT, DST (department of science and technology) and the department of information technology, informed Raja Seevan.

The application does a protein-wise comparison of various organisms simultaneously to identify common polypeptide stretches and assign functions to the proteins. It is effective in the recognition of potential templates for the design and synthesis of broad-spectrum pharmaceutical drugs. The software has already been used to its true potential to screen the SARS-virus sequence and has managed to assign functions to about six of the 11 proteins. The software has helped in the identification of 69 new bacterial targets.