Abstract

Drug and Formulation Discovery: Emerging Opportunities from Phytopharmaceuticals

Bhushan Patwardhan, Professor & Director- ISHS, University of Pune

During last six decades the drug discovery and development has undergone several transitions. The advances in biomedical sciences, biotechnology, genomics and molecular technologies have brought more powerful, broad spectrum chemical and biological drugs for many diseases. The pharmaceutical industry is facing severe innovation deficit. The high throughput chemical or genomic technologies have seldom expedited discovery of newer and safer drugs. The chemical drugs are rapidly getting replaced with biological. The current rate of new drugs discovered is not optimum. Many existing drugs continue to be recalled for safety reasons. With the advent of pharmacogenomics and systems biology concepts the pharmaceutical medicine is becoming more personalized. Industry leaders, pharmaceutical and biomedical scientists are desperately looking for novel approaches, new ideas and innovations to disrupt the discovery bottleneck. Under these circumstances, traditional knowledge-inspired natural products are reemerging as an attractive option. The enormous indigenous knowledge from AYUSH systems may serve as rich sources of new leads not only for new drugs but also offer entire new sets of phytopharmaceuticals, multi target formulations and personalized therapeutics. This lecture will give brief historical account and critical analysis of why current drugs are failing. With help of examples of reverse pharmacology, systems biology, ayugenomics and network pharmacology this lecture will highlight future trends involving mindset shift from single molecule to multicomponent formulation discovery and personalized medicine.