The Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India (GoI) and Piramal Life Sciences Limited (PLSL) has begun Phase II of their drug discovery public private partnership (PPP) to find new drugs from 14000 bioactive cultures discovered in a nationwide search. The search was conducted for new drugs from biodiverse habitats across the country in collaboration with nine national institutes.

A total of 245000 different microbes were collected and characterised at the national centres. Extracts from these microbes were screened for biological activities across four different therapeutic areas namely cancer, diabetes, inflammation and infectious diseases. Based on the results of these studies, the team has identified greater than 14000 cultures that showed potent activities in the above disease conditions: 5000 extracts for anti-infective, 500 extracts for anti-cancer, 6000 for anti-diabetes and 2900 extracts with anti-inflammatory properties.

All 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.

The team has now moved ahead for the second phase of the programme to identify and characterise the chemical entity which is responsible for the bioactivity described for the extracts.

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

In moving these projects forward for characterising the active molecules, PLSL will take advantage of the high end chemistry platforms that can handle batches of more than 500 extracts at a time and follow them through dereplication database analysis.

The above programme is jointly funded by DBT and PLSL.