The Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IIITM-K) will organize an international seminar on 'Computational Drug Discovery in Pharma R&D' at Thiruvananthapuram by end of this month.

The seminar will be held in association with the US chemical simulation software manufacturer Schrödinger, USA. The key objective of the seminar is to impart knowledge on advanced modelling techniques in drug discovery to chemists and life science experts.

The seminar will address the importance of ligand, a molecule in biochemistry and protein preparation in computational studies, docking in virtual screening of ligands and focused library design of selective estrogen receptor.

Modulators using combinatorial docking method, quantum mechanics in structure based drug design, novel methods to predict protein conformational changes during ligand binding are included for deliberations.

Jorg Weiser, vice president, Schrödinger, Germany; Shashidhar Rao, senior application scientist, Schrödinger, USA; Jas Gata Aura, Schrödinger, Britain and R Raghu, Schrödinger, India, will deliver lectures in the seminar.

One of the missions of state-run IIITM-K is to use IT to support higher education and research in various scientific and technology domains.

Schrödinger is widely recognized as a scientific leader in developing state-of-the-art chemical simulation software for use in pharmaceutical and biotechnology research.

The company's products range from general molecular modelling programmes to a full-featured suite of drug design software including both ligand and structure based methods.