India will have new drugs to effectively treat the vector born diseases within three years. All the challenges in this regard will be addressed by pooling the talents of the skilled professionals from the medical and paramedical fraternity as drug development is a multidisciplinary work, said Dr S Rajarajan, president of Indian Association of Medical & Pharmaceutical Virologists.

According to him, a concerted effort of the professionals of medical, pharmacy, biotechnology, microbiology and Veterinary animal sciences is the need of the hour to accelerate the research and development on new drugs to treat the emerging and re emerging viral diseases like dengue, chickungunia, swine flu, viral hepatitis, ross river fever and yellow fever, he said.

In an interview with Pharmabiz, he said the viral diseases pose a great threat to human health and there should be some kind of drugs to effectively treat these without a chance to recur. What is done today is just contain clinical symptoms or block the spread of infection. It is not permanently cured by suitable antiviral drugs. But, there are examples of viral diseases like chicken pox and herpes zoster that can be cured by administering the drug- Acyclovir. In the case of mosquito borne infections, new drugs have to be found to treat them, he said.

As the coordinator of the Bioinformatics Infrastructure Facility Centre of DBT at the Presidency College in Chennai, Dr Rajarajan, associating with other two Institutions, had submitted a project report to the Bioinformatics Division, Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and Government of India to do research on developing new drugs for vector born diseases. The project has been sanctioned by the DBT and the research work will commence soon. He added that Department of Bioinformatics Centre of Pondicherry University and the P G Department of Zoology, DAV College, Kanpur were also in the team of the innovation project.

When briefing on the project, the virologist said, “Our idea is to first conduct a survey of the prevalence of human disease causing viruses among mosquitoes in India. After isolation of virus from mosquitoes, research will be carried out to find out potential anti-virals applying bio-informatics tools (using in silico and confirmation by in vitro methods). By identification of these viruses, mosquito borne, we can plan efficiently to control the spread of viral fever and eradication of mosquito borne viral infection.”

The responsibility to survey and collect mosquitoes is vested with the research fellows of DAV, College, Kanpur. The DBT centre of Presidency College will isolate the viruses and identify them in their laboratory and will find out the susceptibility of the virus to potential anti-viral compounds. The Control of Excellence Department of Bioinformatics of Pondicherry University will suggest what potential compounds are to be tested for anti-viral activity.

He said there is a need for a chain of drugs for any disease as resistance to a drug by a virus may develop sooner or later. Then If one drug is not working or found having resistant strains, an alternative drug can be used. “In the case of Chicken pox, there are reports that Acyclovir is having few resistant strains. So we must develop two or three drugs comparable or superior to Acyclovir and be prepared for new drugs,” Dr S Rajarajan said.

For the new drug innovation, the department has signed an agreement with the Chennai based pharmaceutical manufacturing company Arvind Remedies as a potential Industrial partner under the DST, TDT project (Technology Development Transfer).