Focus: GS-III Science and Technology
Why in news?
The Union Government launched Drug Discovery Hackathon 2020 (DDH2020).
Drug Discovery Hackathon 2020 (DDH2020)
- The Drug Discovery Hackathon is a joint initiative of MHRD’s Innovation Cell (MIC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and supported by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), MyGov as well as private players.
- This Hackathon is first of its kind National initiative for supporting drug discovery process.
- The objective is to identify drug candidates against SARS-CoV-2 by in-silico drug discovery through the hackathon and follow up by chemical synthesis and biological testing.
- This initiative is open for researchers/faculty across the globe to attract international talent.
- There is a need to establish the culture of computational drug discovery in our country.
Hackathon will primarily focus on computational aspects of drug discovery and will have three Tracks.
- Track-1 will deal with computational modelling for drug design or identifying ‘lead’ compounds from existing databases that may have the potential to inhibit SARS-CoV-2.
- Track-2 will encourage participants to develop new tools and algorithms using data analytics and AI/ML approach for predicting drug-like compounds with minimal toxicity and maximal specificity and selectivity.
- Track 3 is a Moon-shot approach which will only deal with novel and out-of-the-box ideas in this field.
