National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Mohali is organising a workshop on Molecular Modelling and Pharmainformatics from 1- 5 November 2004.

The workshop is part of NIPER's commitment to provide continuing education to society by training the college teachers and scientists across the country in the emerging new areas of science and technology. Dr. M. Rami Reddy, from Metabasis Therapeutics Inc., USA, a pioneer in this field inaugurated the workshop.

Delivering his key-note address on "Use of Computer Aided Drug Design Approaches for discovery of potential drug candidates to Diabetes and AIDs - success and limitations," Dr Reddy emphasised the role of fundamental scientific methods like Free energy perturbation, etc. towards the design of new chemical entities. He said, "Computer-Aided Drug Design has become the major component of identifying New Chemical Entities (NCE). Molecular modelling, a major component of Computer-Aided Drug Design, is an emerging field which took shape as an offshoot of theoretical chemistry."

"Pharmainformatics is a field of informatics technology that addresses the problems of pharmaceutical research. It involves the effective integration of several emerging informatics based scientific disciplines, namely Bioinformatics, Chemoinformatics, Biomedical informatics, Clinical informatics, Pharmacy informatics, ADME/Tox informatics, cancer informatics, etc. Molecular modelling and Pharmainformatics find wide-ranging applications in the field of drug design and discovery," he concluded.

Dr. Reddy also gave examples of a number of drugs discovered using the CADD methods due to which, in the past 10 years a significant savings in time and money was realised.

Prof. P Rama Rao, director NIPER, in his welcome address said that NIPER had already conducted several conferences, seminars and workshops in this regard including those addressing the needs of the third world countries and is planning to conduct many more in future.

Eminent professors shall be delivering talks at the above workshop. Speakers from various software companies will be giving demonstrations of molecular modelling software.