Calls for Project Proposals Under “OSDD Chemistry Outreach Program”

NEW DELHI, INDIA -- On the occasion of the International Year of Chemistry in 2011, CSIR launched a Chemistry Outreach Program to create an Open Chemical Library mainly to encourage M.Sc. as well as Ph.D. students at universities/institutes across the length and breadth of the country to carry out research in the area of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery against various infectious diseases like TB and malaria.

The main objective in this program is to support research programs for synthesizing molecules with diverse chemical scaffolds that will be stored in a national repository at CSIR-CDRI and will be made available for the different biological screening programs being pursued under the aegis of Open Source Drug Discovery.

Researchers in universities, academic and research institutes in the country are invited to submit project proposals online in http://crdd.osdd.net/osddchem/ following the guidelines given therein. The proposals can be submitted by any regular faculty of any of the institution. Submissions from industry researchers are also welcome.

The submitted proposals shall undergo online open review which shall form the basis for the final sanction. The sanctioned projects will be funded to the tune of Rs. 1.0 lakh for consumable and non-consumable grant of 5-10 lakhs, depending on the requirements. The consumable grant will be given as an advance to cover the per sample cost and will be adjusted against the number of samples submitted.

Funds will be released subject to signing of an agreement to abide by the terms and conditions contained in the agreement and the terms and conditions of the OSDD license agreement available on the Open Source Drug Discovery web-site www.osdd.net. For any query the proponents may write to the Director, CSIR-CDRI, Lucknow ([email protected]) or Dr. Sanjay Batra ([email protected]).