Cracking the Drug Discovery Code

Driven by a passion to do something of significance on their own, some students and alumni of IIT-D joined hands to set up NI with a capital base of a little more than Rs. 3 lakh. The company aims to create a software to facilitate “target discovery” that helps cut the cost and time required in delivering drugs to the market...

The enterprise, a spin-off from the Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (SCFBio), a research lab at IIT-D under the guidance of professor B. Jayaram, has a virtual library of 13 million drug-like molecules collected from open source platforms or designed in-house using computational methods.

“We are exploring science for better healthcare. Our company is doing two things—focusing on target discovery at genomic and proteomics level for diseases, and simultaneously screening for lead molecules for our clients from our molecule library,” said Avinash Mishra, director and co-founder of NI. He was earlier working with AstraZeneca, a British pharmaceutical and biologics company...