Researchers’ partnership with pharma industry and academia is inevitable to address the present challenges occuring in the area of new drugs discovery, according to experts.

The pharma experts’ reflections on drug discovery issues came out in two separate seminars organised by academic community and industry captains in Tamil Nadu.  The researchers held the symposium in a leading academic institution in Coimbatore and the industry leaders’ convention was held in Chennai. Both the meetings targeted new solutions to address the major hazards in developing new molecules.

The deliberations by the pharma scientists in both the symposia are favouring the idea that before venturing into the project of drug development, a platform has to be created for the scientists, academicians and industry doyens to discuss various issues faced by the drug discovery industry and to transpire a feasible solution. The participants in both the meetings have held that there is a new trend of ‘integrated interdisciplinary approach’ in drug discovery which gives way to tremendous scope in identifying new lead molecules as well as modifying and improving the present drug molecules. This method has to be applied for achieving the targeted results in drug development.

Currently, the drug discovery makes use of techniques such as computational drug design, bioinformatics, pharmacoinformatics, pharmacogenomics, biomarkers, etc. These methods have to be improved and integration of various disciplines like chemistry, biology, microbiology, life sciences, medical sciences, pharmaceutical sciences should be made in order to bring in novel results.

According to the discussions, the major challenges faced by drug discovery sector are identifying new effective drug molecules, making use of information from alternative medicinal fields, reducing the drug manufacturing cost, reducing the drug manufacturing time, identifying reasons for variation in disease and drug responsiveness, identifying personalised drugs and effective drug delivery.  On industry side, the discussion by industry leaders held that product patent regime poses serious challenge to domestic industry unless it invests in research and development.

India is considered a desirable destination for off shoring of data management functions for clinical trials. The country has rich biodiversity and strength in chemistry which support immensely for drug discovery.