Chem-Bio Informatics Approaches to Drug Design by Dr. Rajni Garg

Computer assisted drug design techniques play a major role in lead optimization in drug discovery and development, which significantly reduces the time and cost. Chem.-bio informatics encompasses the design, organization, storage, management, retrieval, analysis, dissemination, visualization and use of chemical and biological information. Various tasks involved are data mining, molecular modeling (docking), defining quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR), pharmacophore mapping, structure/substructure searching etc. for predicting biological activity and other properties from chemical structure. Lately, many engineering approaches such as data mining, neural networks, pattern recognition, shape analysis and 3D graphics are being increasingly applied for multi-modality data analysis in order to understand the drug-receptor interaction. In the first part of the talk an introduction of QSAR, neural network, pharmacophore mapping and some of the molecular modeling techniques will be presented. The second half will focus on role of some of the emerging approaches in chem.-bio informatics and a few selected applications in HIV drug design and environmental toxicity will be presented.Bio:
Dr. Rajni Garg received the Ph.D. degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India in 1996. She joined Professor Corwin Hansch’s laboratory for her postdoctoral research in 1997. She is now a Research Professor in Chemistry and Bimolecular Science Department at Clarkson University, NY; and chemistry and Biochemistry Department at Cal State, San Marcos, CA. Her research interests are in the areas of computer-aided drug design, database development, data mining, chembioinformatics, and environmental toxicity prediction. Dr. Garg is a member of ACS, ISCB, AAAS and many other Societies. She received ACS Cycle of Excellence Award for most accessed article in Chem. Rev. in 2004. Currently, Dr. Garg is advising 3 graduate students research at Clarkson University (see website www.clarkson.edu/~rgarg). Students in her lab have received prestigious CCG Excellence Graduate Award (230th ACS National Meeting, 2005), Shipley Teaching Assistantship award (2005-2006), and CINF- Graduate Fellowship (231st ACS National Meeting, 2006) and summer internships in Pfizer, Wyeth etc. Dr. Garg is a co-author of 32 technical publications in international journals. She has presented her research in 37 national and international conferences as well as contributed two book chapters. Dr. Garg serves as expert reviewer for articles submitted in Mini-Reviews in Medicinal Chemistry, Current Medicinal Chemistry, Bioorganic Medicinal Chemistry, Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Internet Electronic Journal of Molecular Design and Letters in Drug Design and Discovery.Host: Professor CC Jay Kuo, x04658, cckuo@sipi.usc.edu

Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 116

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Gloria Halfacre