Amritsar, December 12 – With the research infrastructure created in Guru Nanak Dev University by the vice-chancellor Prof. A.S. Brar, the faculty of the university is engaged in high quality and path breaking research activities. With a worldwide figure of 10 million deaths annually and ‘expensive but not sure’ treatment of cancer put the challenge before the scientific community for developing new treatments of this disease.
Taking the challenge of developing highly effective, safe and economical anticancer drugs, research group of Prof. Palwinder Singh including Kamaldeep Paul, Anu, Atul, Jatinder Kaur, Matinder Kaur, Puja Verma, Shaveta (all Ph.D. students) and Sukhmeet Kaur, Amandeep Kaur, Rajni (M.Sc. Students) in the Department of Chemistry, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar oriented research programme towards the development of new anticancer drugs. Efforts of last 6-7 years involving design and synthesis of new molecules and their screening for anticancer activities at National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, USA led to the identification of a compound which has been passed through various preliminary anticancer tests and ready for clinical trials. If everything goes well, this new anticancer drug will be much cheaper and more effective as compare to the presently clinically available anticancer drugs. According to our estimate, this new drug will cost only Rs. 10 for a 200 mg dose.
In another project, the same research group has developed small molecules as sensors for various metal ions and anions amongst which the sensing of mercury, iron, copper, fluoride and cyanide etc. are prominent ones due to their biological and environmental significance. Recently, the research group has created new compounds and found them to be workable under aqueous and physiological conditions and these compounds are capable to remove KCN/NaCN from water as well as blood samples. Since these compounds have drug like properties, efforts are going on to develop them as antidotes of cyanide. Drug resistance is a major hurdle in the successful chemotherapy of various diseases especially cancer and microbial ones, research group of Prof. Palwinder Singh in collaboration with Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi has created new modulators which increase the concentration of antimicrobial drugs inside the cells. The research group of Prof. Singh has also developed new probes for monitoring of various metabolic processes; two of them involved in metabolism of glucose have been successfully monitored by using fluorescent probes. This work of monitoring the biochemical pathways will explore the working of various components of the human body under normal as well as abnormal conditions and will be highly applicable for basic and applied research. Best teacher awarded by Chemical Research Society of India, Bangalore in 2011 and with more than 50 research publications in high impact factor journals, Prof. Singh has generated about Rs. 1 crore of funds in the last 10 years from various funding agencies like DST, CSIR, UGC and is also collaborating with Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow and Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. Gurgaon for creating antimalarial, antituberculosis and anticoaugulant drugs.
