Covid as a pandemic has created significant morbidity and mortality asking for a solution. Atrimed Pharmaceuticals, being specialized in drug development based on plant-based molecules, has a systematic approach for drug development. The steps include target identification, lead generation, lead optimization, ligand-target binding in silico studies, MD Simulation, in vitro studies, in vivo studies, and human trials.
spike glycoprotein, RdRp, 3CLPro, PLPro, E-Protein, and M-protein are the drug targets that have been identified and worked upon. Understanding plant chemistry and computational chemistry takes a significant role in lead generation. Since we have a library of plant molecules, initial screening is done by looking for simulation studies for target ligand binding. Lead optimization is carried out by making changes at chemical moieties to simplify the synthesis, reduce the size or improve the binding. Subsequent retrospective similarity search can identify the potential plants. A polypharmacology approach to identify a molecule for multiple targets or, multiple molecules in a single plant towards the same or multiple targets or multiple molecules in multiple plants for different or same targets is one of the strategies to be adopted. All these strategies need to be reconfirmed in vitro as well as in vivo experiments before trying them in human beings.
Through a good understanding of medicinal chemistry, analytical chemistry, and Synthesis, a team of chemists can contribute to getting physical samples for experiments.
Thus a translational work between traditional medicine practitioners, computation biologists, medicinal chemists, synthetic chemists, Microbiologists/Molecular biologists/Biotechnologists, veterinarians/Animal pharmacologists, and finally clinical pharmacologists leads to drug development at Atrimed Pharmaceuticals. The drug development for Covid is currently at Phase-1 and will resume to Phase 2 & 3 soon.
