Dinkar Sahal
ICGEB, INDIA
Title: Confluence of Biological Inspiration and chemical intuition in search of Novel Drugs Against Malaria
Biography
Biography: Dinkar Sahal
Abstract
The parasite that causes malaria has been tormenting mankind for a long time and the image of a child dying of malaria every minute continues to haunt us even today. Our handling of malaria for the last hundred years has taught us that the malaria parasite which relishes riding on the invertebrate mosquito vector to fly from one vertebrate victim to another vertebrate host is not easy to control. Its ancient heritage appears to have taught the parasite to emerge with heightened vengeance whenever we have challenged it with either ill equipped vaccines or misused drugs. Today’s malaria parasite is well equipped to conquer almost all antimalarial drugs through resistance and we have miles to go before we have credible vaccines against malaria. While it is true that our best drugs against several diseases including Malaria have been gifts of Nature, it is equally true that synthetic medicinal chemistry has played a commendable role in chiselling and tweaking Nature’s pharmacophores to enhance potency, decrease toxicity and making drugs affordable for the poorest of the poor. My talk will illustrate the ethos of my laboratory which is to study marine organisms, medicinal plants, Cyanobacteria and endophytic fungi for new drugs against Malaria. Towards this mission, we are using high through put fluorescence based microtiter plate assays to culture the malaria parasite in human red blood cells and to examine the effects of potential drugs on the growth of the parasite. On finding hits, we subject natural extracts to activity guided high resolution chromatographic separation to isolate highly purified compounds against Malaria. Working in close association with “chemical collaborators” we then determine the chemical structures of Nature’s pharmacophores and validate the same through chemical synthesis. While the pursuit of discovering novel antimalarials is continuing, we are currently engaged in fine tuning of a natural antimalarial for optimum medicinal properties and drugability.