Amrita School of Pharmacy, Kochi, organised a workshop on in-silico drug design using Biovia Discovery Studio on 4^th and 5^th September, 2017. Dr. Sabitha M., Principal, Amrita School of Pharmacy, Kochi, lighted the lamp and inaugurated the event. Dr. Subin Mary Zachariah, Associate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry & Analysis, Amrita School of Pharmacy, Kochi, delivered the welcome address and introduced the facilitator, Dr. Anand Krishnamurthy Senior Scientist at BIOVIA at Dassault Systems.

In the four working sessions, handled by Dr. Anand Krishnamurthy with technical support from Mr. G. Sreenivasan, various aspects of in-silico drug design by Biovia Discovery Studio software were discussed. Faculty members and students from Amrita School of Pharmacy and St. Joseph’s College of Pharmacy participated in the event. The participants were provided with a 30-day trial version of the software installed into their personal systems along with printed material on the details of the workshop.

The first session focused on the terminology and working procedures provided in the Biovia Discovery Studio software along with an introduction on the reach of the same. The second session was dedicated to the docking process. The third session, which began on the next day, was fully dedicated to QSAR studies and pharmacophore modelling. The fourth session was dedicated to homology modelling. Design of a three dimensional view of a protein structure from similar sequences available from the different gene and sequence databases were described.

In the valedictory function, Dr. Sabitha M. expressed the importance of computational tools in the process of drug design and development and re-affirmed the institution’s commitment to take this initiative forward and organise advanced workshops in the future. The participants gave their feedback on the program and their experience in handling the software.