October 7, 2015. The first international conference on Drug Discovery and Development in Developing countries (DRDC) held in Dhaka from 3-6 October, 2015 concluded extremely successfully. The conference was organized by the Bangladesh University of Health Sciences (NUHS) and sponsored by The International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology and Incepta Pharmaceuticals Limited. The Scientists whose brain-child this useful, timely and successful conference was, are, Prof. Ahmed A. Azad, Incepta Distinguished Professor, Dr. Liaquat Ali, Vice Chancellor, BUHS and his team, as well Mr. Abdul Muktadir, Managing Director, Incepta and his team.
Scientists from India, Pakistan, Argentina, Bangladesh, Turkey and Japan showed elegant evidence for the use of natural drugs for the treatment of chronic diseases and the techniques of bioprospecting for new drugs from these natural biota. There was also talk on how natural molecules could be slightly modified to produce newer or more efficient drugs. Young scientists from Bangladesh and participating countries talked about integration of stem cell technologies and drug designing using bioinformatics and immunoinformatics as tools.
There was talk about different technologies for drug purification from natural and recombinant sources as well as drug delivery. The highlight of the meeting were the presentations of young Bangladeshi expatriate scientists from Singapore, USA, UK, Pakistan and Japan, as well as from Bangladesh. They talked about genetic engineering for animal model development for testing of drugs, role of structural biology in finding new targets for cardiovascular disease, use of computational methods in medicinal chemistry to design better drugs and epigenetic drugs.
The presentations from both Incepta representing industry and icddrb representing application-based research were both inspiring and promising. The talks presented research and development of biologics and vaccines at Incepta. Some of the vaccine products are results of an excellent collaboration between Incepta and icddrb. Eminent scientists from the USA gave talks about non-toxic bacterial anti-cancer peptides and their potential. There was also a talk on targeting insulin and insulin-like receptors for weight and obesity control. The presentation from ICDDR,B showed the progress in vaccine design, development, production and clinical trials. There were also several presentations from INCEPTA on the prospects and production of Biosimilars at this pharmaceutical company. It may be mentioned here that INCEPTA has been acclaimed to be as one of the best pharmaceutical companies in the developing world,
The concluding session recommended inter alia suggestions to the UGC for creating many more as well as prestigious Ph.D. and postdoc fellowships, the creation of core facilities,, maybe at BCSIR where all research groups would have access to the latest machinery for designing and testing drugs as well as establishing structural biological facilities. It was mentioned that Bangladesh has the advantage of being one of the few countries where patent protection for therapeutic biologics does not exist for a few more years. Bangladesh could therefore potentially produce many therapeutical drugs at a fraction of the existing cost and therefore be of service to many Developing countries including herself by producing life-saving drugs to those who cannot afford it. [Communicated by Professor Zeba Seraj at the the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology]