National Institute of Pharmceutical Education and Research (NIPER) is conducting a workshop on Pharmacoinformatics in drug design on April 14 - 16, 2005. The workshop focuses on the emerging field of Pharmacoinformatics including Computer Aided Drug Design (CADD), an important field, which took shape as an offshoot of theoretical chemistry, but with wide ranging applications.

The other areas that are to be touched upon are quantum chemistry, molecular mechanics, molecular docking, 3D QSAR (Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship), conformational analysis, etc. The workshop not only teaches the technical background of the above methods but also provides practical training in using the important software based on the above topics, claimed a NIPER release.

During the workshop, there will be 4 to 5 lectures and 4 hours of practical training. The software will be mainly PC based, so as to reach wide range of participants. Some specific examples will be taken up using the SGI based platform also. Scientists, researchers, teachers and students who are involved in research in the areas related to medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, natural products, pharmacology, pharmaceutics, biotechnology, etc. from academic, scientific and industrial setups are attending the workshop. Pharmacoinformatics is emerging as a new discipline as a result of the integration of Bioinformatics, Chemoinformatics, Chemogenomics, in-silico ADME/T methods, Pharmacy informatics etc. especially catering to the needs of the pharmaceutical sciences by providing the scientific and technical tools, for target specific drug design & development.