IIT Madras researchers are working in the path of targeting HIV-1 protease.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras are working on a revolutionary concept that can enable create helpful drugs for the remedy of HIV/AIDS. The group of researchers stated that the efficacy of drugs against the HIV virus can be enhanced by introducing electrostatic interaction websites on molecules of the possible drug. The findings of the study – led by Prof. Sanjib Senapati, Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras along with study scholars Chinmai Pindi and Mohammed Ahsan – have been published in Biochemistry, a peer-evaluation Journal of the American Chemical Society.
AIDS is a main result in of death in quite a few nations and researchers have been working to come across an helpful drug for the illness given that its outbreak practically 4 decades ago. In a bid to come across far better drugs to combat HIG strains, researchers of IITM decided to discover more about the molecular structure of the protease to figure out weak websites that can give far better understanding for enhanced inhibitor improvement.
Researchers are working in the path of targeting HIV-1 protease. AIDS virus makes use of this crucial enzyme for maturation and development. Drug developers are aiming at establishing effective inhibitors of the enzyme. Inhibitors make enzymes unavailable to the virus by binding with them.
Elaborating it, Professor Senapati stated, “Currently, inhibitors use weak forces of attraction to target HIVPR. This force is called ‘van der Waal’s forces’ and is used to attach themselves to the protease molecule. Because of the weak force, the virus soon becomes resistant to the drug.”
Professor Senapati and his group have applied state-of-art computational methods to uncover essential information that will be valuable in establishing more efficacious drugs. IIT Madras researchers carried out Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation research and discovered that if a drug molecule can be developed with a complementary charge, it can permanently inhibit/deactivate the enzyme.
“There is no electrostatic complementarity in drugs currently available. It is well known that electrostatic forces between molecules are far more strong than van der Waals forces and therefore it is important to investigate it,” the professor stated.
The researchers have proposed that each electrostatic and van der Waals interactions ought to be embraced to complement the HIVPR active website architecture.