Bacterial Enzymes as Targets for Drug Discovery

Dr. Kaur’s specialties include Bioinformatics, Structural Biology, X-ray Crystallography, and Rational Structure-Based Drug Design. Her research focuses on clinically relevant bacterial pathogens where a multidisciplinary approach is adopted to understand the antibacterial resistance mechanisms and design of novel inhibitory molecules. She has published more than 240 original publications, reviews and chapters in the field of bioinformatics, biophysical enzymatic activity and structural biology. Dr. Priyanka Sharma is a postdoctoral student with the biomedical Informatics department at the ICMR. Her work focuses on the field of computational biology involving structural bioinformatics and genomics of bacterial pathogens. She has published widely in the field of clinical bacteriology and is the author of over 30 research papers, reviews and chapters. She has work experience in field of antimicrobial resistance due to enzymatic mutations.

Part I Primer of antibiotic discovery process
1. Antibacterial drug discovery: An introduction
2. Druggability of a target site
3. Dual inhibition as a novel strategy for antibiotic discovery
4. Conserved enzymes across the bacterial pathogens serves as great drug targets
5. Validation of drug targets using molecular methodologies
6. Selection of Enzymatic activity assays for validation of inhibitory potential
7. Computational tools to identify potential drug targets in bacteria
8. Antimicrobial drug resistance and bypassing strategies

Part II Bacterial enzyme as drug targets
9. Strategic identification of novel enzymes as antibacterial drug targets
10. Inhibiting the replication by targeting topoisomerases
11. Aminoglycoside modifying Enzymes (AMEs)
12. Role of beta lactamases in antibiotic drug discovery
13. Combining efflux pump inhibitory agents for broad spectrum antibacterial activity
14. Ribosomal binding antibacterial agents
15. DNA dependent RNA polymerase as an attractive drug target
16. Polymyxins and their role as next generation inhibitory compounds
17. Arresting the peptidoglycan synthesis to kill the bacteria
18. Bacterial Proteases
19. Targeting lipase enzyme for drug discovery
20. Bacteriophage mechanisms for identification of target enzymes
21. Role of regulatory RNAs as antibacterial drug targets
22. Pathogen specific antibiotic discovery
23. Drug Repurposing: Tackling the antibiotic resistance with existing therapeutics