The Indian Institute of Chemical Technology has organized a six-day national workshop called ‘Industrial Applications of Cheminformatics and Computer Aided Drug Design’ at Hyderabad from January 12-17 2004.

The intensive six-day workshop is designed to provide exhaustive exposure to the practical and fundamental principles behind Cheminformatics and Computer Aided Drug Design (CCAD). Lectures by experts in these fields and hands-on training on various software packages will be provided with emphasis on relevance in contemporary industrial research.

Cheminformatics and molecular modeling have become an integral part of modern drug design and discovery. Cheminformatics is the transformation of data into knowledge by means of extracting information from raw data. The in silico studies of drug-receptor complexes at molecular level and evaluation of the chemical and biological properties of molecules have gained momentum in recent years.

Additionally, launching of databases involving chemicals and their biological activity data encourages the pharma companies to make optimal use of these. In this connection, research on chemical structure encoding, molecular modeling, application of artificial intelligence tools, data mining will be of immense help.

The workshop involves various modules such as- cheminformatics, structural databases, data mining, combi- chem libraries, artificial intelligence, in silico screening, structure based drug design, analog based drug design, 2D and 3D-QSAR, docking, homology modeling, scoring techniques, molecular dynamics and simulations. The workshop involves 19 eminent speakers drawn from academia, industry and national laboratories.