Facility for natural products soon at IICT

Hyderabad, Nov 14 (UNI) India's National Facility for Combinatorial Natural Products (NFCNP) will be ready at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) here by July 2007, providing a major platform in its quest for discovery of new drugs using the repository of traditional Ayurvedic medicinal plants.

Talking to mediapersons here at the two-day Indo-US conference on new bioactive molecules of natural products, which began yesterday, IICT Director J S Yadav said buildings to house the specialised equipment were likely to be ready over the next seven months.

To set up the National Facility funds of Rs 23 crore was jointly collected by the Department of Science and Technology and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), he added.

NFCNP would help generate combinatorial libraries of bioactive natural products with ease, for which pharma companies and drug researchers were currently depending on back-up from abroad.

This would cut time and cost, which was the focus of pharma and new drug development, he said.

The international conference was the third since CSIR and the National Centre for Natural Products Research, US, entered into an MoU in October 2005 to focus on new bioactive molecules.

The main aim of the MoU was to organise joint research programmes for bilateral exchange of scientists and conduct research in the area of new drug development.

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