Union HRD Minister launches “Drug Discovery Hackathon 2020”

Drug Discovery Hackathon” has been launched by the Union Minister for Human Resource Development Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ and Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Science and Technology Dr. Harsh Vardhan. The hackathon is a joint initiative of MHRD, AICTE and CSIR, and supported by partners such as CDAC, MyGov, Schrodinger and ChemAxon. DDH2020 is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and supported by partners like Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), MyGov and private players.Researchers/Faculty across the world, students studying in India and abroad.

What is Drug Discovery Hackathon?

• This hackathon is the first national initiative of its kind to help in the drug discovery process.
• There will be participation of professionals, teachers, researchers and students from various fields like computer science, chemistry, pharmacy, medical science, basic science and biotechnology.

In-Silico Drug Discovery

• In-Silico is an expression used to mean “performed on computer or via computer simulation.”
• In-Silico drug discovery process is thus the identification of the drug target molecule by employing bioinformatics tools.
  • Drug target molecules generally include DNA, RNA and proteins such as receptors, enzymes etc.
  • Identification of drug target molecules help in knowing their pharmacological relevance to the disease under investigation.
• Bioinformatics is the application of computational technology (such as Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) to handle the rapidly growing repository of information related to molecular biology.

It will primarily focus on computational aspects of drug discovery and will have three Tracks.

Track-1 will deal with computational modelling for drug design or identifying ‘lead’ compounds from existing databases that may have the potential to inhibit SARS-CoV-2.

Track-2 will encourage participants to develop new tools and algorithms using data analytics and AI/ML approach for predicting drug-like compounds with minimal toxicity and maximal specificity and selectivity.

Track 3 will only deal with novel and out-of-the-box ideas in this field.

Participants will submit their ideas online after which the CSIR and other labs will work towards executing them.

UPSC