Three years after Piramal Life Sciences Ltd (PLSL) entered into a drug-discovery partnership with the Department of Biotechnology to search for new drugs from bio-diverse habitats, the project has entered its second phase.

About 14,000 bio-active cultures were discovered from bio-diverse habitats across the country, in collaboration with nine national institutes, PLSL said. The project, jointly funded by DBT and PLSL, had been first announced in early 2008.

The team has now moved ahead for the second phase of the programme to identify and characterise the chemical entity, which is responsible for the bioactivity in the extracts, the company said.

As a result of high-end technology platforms both in biology and chemistry, rapidity in isolation has been achieved, and 1,000 extracts out of the 14,000 will be evaluated within the next 18 months to obtain lead molecules, it added.

Screened

A total of 2,45,000 different microbes were collected and characterised at the national centres. Extracts from these microbes were screened for biological activities across four different therapeutic areas — cancer, diabetes, inflammation and infectious diseases, the note said.

Based on the results of these studies, the team has identified more than 14,000 cultures that showed potent activities in the select disease conditions — 5,000 extracts for anti-infective, 500 extracts for anti-cancer, 6,000 for anti-diabetes and 2,900 extracts with anti-inflammatory properties, the note added.

All these cultures are in the process of classification and storage in a national repository created by the DBT at the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS). This database is a starting point for the isolation of novel leads useful to develop drugs.

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