Stress on new anti-TB drugs

?TUBERCULOSIS IS one of the most infectious diseases in the world, affecting nearly one-third of the global population?, said Dr RP Tripathi of the Central Drug Research Institute (Lucknow) here on Saturday.

“TUBERCULOSIS IS one of the most infectious diseases in the world, affecting nearly one-third of the global population”, said Dr RP Tripathi of the Central Drug Research Institute (Lucknow) here on Saturday.

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He was delivering a lecture on ‘Identification Glycoconjugates as Novel Inhibitors of NAD Plus Dependent DNA Ligase from M Tuberculosis by Virtual Screening of a Virtual Library’ during the second day of the two-day national symposium on ‘Designing the Molecular World Through Chemistry’ in the Chemistry Department in Banaras Hindu University here on Saturday.

Dr Tripathi said that development of resistance to almost all sorts of the drugs available today and the worsening combination of HIV and TB had led to an urgent need for new drug development against these diseases. “Many biochemical targets and their inhibitors are being explored to develop new mechanism-based anti-TB drugs”, he said.

“In our ongoing effort to develop anti-TB molecules we have focused on DNA ligases of M Tuberculosis. DNA ligases are important enzymes which catalyze the joining of nicks between adjacent bases of double standard DNA”, he said. “NAD Plus dependent DNA ligases are essential in bacteria and are absent in humans”, he said.