The Human Genome Project has revealed the existence of approximately 40,000 genes, some of which could be used as new targets for drug design purposes. There is a tremendous potential in the study of their functional genomics and the corresponding protein structure vis-à-vis drug design. Almost all the leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies are focusing their efforts to discover new targets and to design new and better drugs.

The aim of this course is to impart training in the basic principles of protein structure, to generate the three dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence and its utilization in the structure based drug design studies. The course covers computational approaches to the drug discovery & design processes such as analogue based designs and pharmacophore based studies that are very useful in the absence of 3D-structural information of relevant targets.

There is a huge shortage in manpower with the requisite skill sets to perform such studies. This course tries to address such a need by imparting a comprehensive training in Protein Modeling and Rational Drug Discovery techniques.