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: Researchers in drug laborataries often compare their work to finding a needle in a haystack of scientific data. Hardly surprising, considering the high-cost and labour-intensive, trial-and-error process, often spanning a timeframe of 15-20 years involved in drug design and discovery. Indian pharmaceutical and biotech majors like Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Wockhardt, Sun Pharma, Nicholas Piramal and Ranbaxy are now deploying a new tool of modern drug discovery, called cheminformatics, for lead screening of promising drug molecules of greater importance at earlier stages, as well as for the optimisation of new chemical entities (NCE). Till now, bioinformatics was coming to their rescue through the use of mathematical, statistical and IT tools to manage and analyse biological data.

The idea is to reduce the cost of launch and time to market. Cheminformatics, says Pradep Nair, head (global life sciences practice) of HCL Technologies is being extensively used by several major pharma companies in the drug design space.

“Companies like Orchid, Ranbaxy, Alembic, Glenmark, Wockhardt and Sun Pharma are using it today. Coupled with bioinformatics, this technology would help in drastically cutting short the time for screening potential candidates and designing the right molecule to be synthesised. We would be able to market the drug much faster and reduce the cost of launch,” he adds.

Research trends globally suggest that successful medicines of the future will require new drug discovery approaches that bring more effective medicines to patients faster and cheaper, says Vivek Malhotra, business manager (India, Taiwan & South East Asia), BD Medical—Pharmaceutical Systems.

In this regard, cheminformatics is coming to the rescue of Indian pharmaceutical and biotech companies, fiercely competing with their global counterparts and dealing with generic drugs, to explore new drug molecules, especially in the areas of oncology, dermatology, cardiac disorders and therapeutics for the aging population.

Within the field of offshoring of high-end knowledge work or knowledge process outsourcing (KPO), cheminformatics is poised to make huge strides too.

A quick glimpse of different ways in how companies in the drug design and discovery arena can avail of cheminformatic solutions: a drug discovery department can quickly index and search its massive chemical compound collection. A software company can develop an application that predicts dozens of physiochemical properties from molecular structures. A pharmaceutical or biotech research company can implement a scientific information management system for chemical registration, structure, and substructure searching.