National Chemical Laboratories (NCL) at Pune is planning to commission the combinatorial chemistry cum bio laboratory - the first of its kind in India in February 2003. The new high throughput screening and data storage facility, which is set up with an investment of around Rs. 9-10 crore, will be equipped with the most modern devises for potential molecule search.
Commenting on the aim of the laboratory, Dr. K. N. Ganesh, Head, Organic Chemistry Department, NCL says, "The main objective is to create a library of properly barcoded known and newly developed molecules/compounds that can be used for pharma as well as other industries." Dr. Ganesh feels that the library would be a boon for the pharmaceutical industry, as it would give them a wide variety of molecules or compounds to work upon.
Theoretically there are (10) 40 molecules but presently not even 5% of this huge number exist at present. Dr. Ganesh believes such labs to help find as many new molecules or compounds as possible. Dwelling on the state-of-the-art technology installed in the lab, Dr. Ganesh says, "The instruments are imported from Germany. The lab houses Integrated High Throughput Screening facility that can screen 8 000-10,000 compounds /molecules a day. Amongst other facilities in the lab, Parallel Organic Synthesiser is also installed that can perform 64 -128 organic reactions simultaneously depending on reaction volumes".
The lab will be operational in the month of February 2003. It will perform three operations namely, synthesizing organic compounds or molecules, carrying out biological screening and chemical characterization of the natural products. Dr. Ganesh assured that the identification of biologically active compounds in the plants through chemical characterization would help develop more effective herbal formulations. In the future, the lab hopes to bring material chemistry too, in its ambit to have more updated library of compounds.
The main task that the lab would perform is to provide lead compounds to pharma industries that can further be developed for making new drugs/medicines. "There are also plans of leasing out the facility to pharma industries for their research work" added Dr. Ganesh.With year 2005 just round the corner, the lab can, no doubt, be a silver lining for the Indian pharma industry.