The Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) is establishing a 'National Facility for Combinatorial Natural Products' with the financial assistance from Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The facility is to be established with an initial investment of Rs.24 crore and is expected to be operational by next two years.

Dr JS Yadav, director, IICT told Pharmabiz, "The proposed facility will work on natural products chemistry and combinatorial chemistry. The basic objective of the proposed facility is to systematically scan the vast plant resources available in India and identify the biologically active molecules from them to generate libraries of compounds for biological screening. The libraries will be screened for different activities."

The facility will have state-of-the-art equipments required for drug development. It has been also proposed to set up a molecular bank that will have a depository of compounds with automatic storage and retrieval facilities using the advanced robotic technologies.

It is also proposed to have modern biological screening facilities such as high throughput screening. The drug development centres of industry will be benefited by the national facility as the centres will get the biologically active compounds isolated from the Indian medicinal plants under one roof for further exploitation, Dr Yadav added.

IICT has created a dedicated team to facilitate the setting up of this facility led by Dr S Chandrasekhar and also includes Dr J Madhusudhana Rao, Dr Manika Pal Bhadra, Dr PV Srinivas and Dr P Srihari. The team is expected to have about 20 scientists. The project is supervised by IICT director Dr JS Yadav.

IICT will be responsible for knowledge support and manpower, DST will fund up to Rs.16 crore while CSIR will fund up to Rs.8 crore towards the establishment of the facility. The team is aiming at developing about four 'Investigative New Drugs' (INDs) by the end of 2010, he informed.