New Delhi: In the present situation of corona outbreak, when the scientific community world over is focusing their energy on making new vaccine, India takes a step ahead in research and innovation. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India launched Drug Discovery Hackathon.
The Drug Discovery Hacathon 2020 is a joint initiative of MHRD, AICTE and CSIR and supported by partners like CDAC, MyGov, Schrodinger and ChemAxon. Union Minister for Human Resource Development Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’and Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Science and Technology Dr. Harsh Vardhan launched Drug Discovery Hackathon in the presence of the Union Minister of State Sanjay Dhotre through online platform.
Minister Pokhriyal said that the hackathon is first of its kind national initiative for supporting drug discovery process. He further disclosed that to attract international talent, the hackathon will be open to participation from across the globe from professionals, faculty, researchers and students from varied fields like computer science, chemistry, Pharmacy, medical sciences, basic sciences and biotechnology. He further said that MHRD and AICTE have vast experience in organizing Hackathons but for the first time, we are using hackathon model for tackling a great scientific challenge.
Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Science & Technology said, ‘the objective is to identify drug candidates against SARS-CoV-2 by in-silico drug discovery through the hackathon and follow up by chemical synthesis and biological testing.’ He added, ‘in-silico drug discovery which utilizes computational methods such as machine learning, AI and big data will help in accelerating this process.’
Hackathon 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 while 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. A third track, named Track 3 is a Moon-shot approach which will only deal with novel and out-of-the-box ideas in this field.
