Drug design strategies against newly emerging viral diseases

The proposed project aims at the structure-based design of novel selective inhibitors for the treatment of specific vector-borne diseases mainly parasitic (schistosomiasis, human African trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease) and viral hemorrhagic fevers. It will be a challenging task to find those compounds that have maximal efficacy against the intruder, but minimal toxicity for the host as the differences between few parasitic target proteins (i.e. Kinases and HDAC active sites) and human are in general tiny (Thangapandian et al., 2012). However, since others have successfully designed selective anti-parasitic inhibitors (Andrews et al., 2000), it should also be possible to design targeted drugs. The current project will also focus on molecular targets (i.e., envelope glycoprotein and NSPs) that aim to encourage anti-viral drug discovery efforts. Also, as it should be possible to administer the novel drugs via the oral route, the fine-tuning of the pharmacokinetic properties of the lead compounds is an additional important issue to be taken into account in the inhibitor design. A multi-pronged structure-based drug design approach will be used to achieve the project's specific objectives This comprehensive multi-stage research will generate results that help in the discovery and design of novel lead structures for the development of selective and potent anti-parasitic and anti-viral drugs with most favorable pharmacokinetic properties. Potential active candidate compounds will be patented and further developed with a suitable pharmaceutical company. The results will be published in high-level peer-reviewed scientific journals so that the scientific communities working on the development of anti-parasitic agents and potential compounds can also utilize the new knowledge in their research. Finally, this project will help me reach my goals in getting a Ph.D. degree and taking the acquired know-how back to my home country.

Publication year:2020

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