Masala or Medicine?

Drug discovery and development are expensive and time-consuming processes. Removing non-drug-like compounds from the drug discovery lifecycle in the early stages can lead to tremendous savings of resources. Structure information is increasingly used in the drug design process and has contributed significantly to the discovery of several marketed drugs and it is well known that in silico approaches are comparatively cheaper than in vivo and in vitro screenings. Since there is currently no research related to the structure based drugability studies of the compounds from spices (particularly by using cheminformatics approaches). For the very first time, this study employs cheminformatics approaches to identify potent drug candidates from selected spices of the family Zingiberaceae. The analysis confirmed the drugness of 13 compounds from 404 compounds of the selected spices. This helps in eliminating non-drug-like compounds, and it is of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry.

Autorentext

Dr. S. Balaji received his M.Sc., M.Phil and Ph.D in Bioinformatics.He worked as a Research Associate in Indian Institute of Spices Research. He is currently working as an Associate Professor in Manipal Institute of Technology. He is a receipient of young scientist award for the year 2010-11 by the Government of Karnataka, India.