A senior professor of chemistry at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) Ashwini Kumar Nangia, has published a novel approach which is likely to help accelerate the discovery and development of high bioavailability drugs.
The present-day model of drug discovery is based on identifying molecular ‘pharmacophores’, which are bioactive structural units in molecules tested for pharmacological action. However, over 80% of drugs are formulated as tablets or capsules and more than 90% pharmaceutical lead compounds in clinical development suffer from poor bioavailability due to low solubility and/or low permeability, said an official release from the university.
The new model imparts high solubility and permeability in the same molecule for accelerating the overall drug discovery cycle compared to the traditional two-stage process. By searching drug molecules and crystal structure databases and culling the voluminous data using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, a medicinal chemist should be able to rationally shift the structural information and reach the target drug molecules of high bioavailability more efficiently and with higher success rate.
The novel hybrid model has appeared as a scientific perspective in Wiley international journal, Angewandte Chemie, of the German Chemical Society, and also in the American Chemical Society Journal Chemical Reviews. Prof. Nangia is a JC Bose Fellow of SERB-DST, and a Fellow of the three premier National Science Academies of India, said a press release.
