The research of the Dakshanamurthy Laboratory focuses on small molecule drug-design, and specializes in drug-design, discovery, and modeling. Our research involves topics including small-molecule design, chemoinformatics, drug-repurposing, database design, Toxiconomics, software development, and nanomedical drug-delivery.
These topics lead to a disparate range of applications, requiring a broad skill set involving computer-modeling, chemistry, in-vitro wet-lab studies, web-development, database curration, knowledge of human toxicology, mathematics, and bio-chemical/physical modeling. Accordingly, member researchers are drawn from diverse fields including biochemistry, biology, computer-science, mathematics, medicine, and physics.
This study involves high-throughput virtual screening of vast libraries of small ligand molecules; acting to narrow the range from that of all possible small-molecule compounds (~10^60 [1]), down to a focused library of which will be tested in-vitro.
Drug-repurposing addresses the very costs of modern drug-development, which suffers from very high costs (~1 billion / succesfull drug ), long development times, and low-chances of success. In drug-repositioning, currently tested and governmentally-approved drugs are investigated for application to new-diseases.
As analyses become more sophisticated and computationally demanding, and databases enlarge exponentially, drug-development has transitioned into a "Big Data" field - where computational methods have become an inextricable part of the experimental and theoretical science itself.
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