College of Pharmacy

Educational Background:

Scholarly Interests and Research Areas:

• Organic / Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacology
• Drug Discovery
• Drug Metabolism
• Phytochemistry
• Ligand Design  
• Parallel Synthesis

Research Summary:

Research in our group revolves around chemical synthesis, drug discovery and drug metabolism studies. We rely on the concepts of pharmacology to design new drugs and medicinal agents. We are currently involved in the study of Antimalarial Activities of Cyclen based 4- Aminoquinoline Analogs. Our primary objective in this regard is to develop chloroquine analogs of antimalarial and antileishmanial drugs. We employ traditional synthetic organic chemistry and medicinal chemistry for the execution of the synthesis of our target molecules and use analytical methods such as NMR, GC-MS, LC-MS, etc. for the structural characterization and HPLC for further analysis.

Additional areas of research focus are (1) the development of prodrugs for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), and (2) development of novel adsorbents for water purification. Since neurodegenerative disorders are characterized by unscheduled apoptosis which results in the loss of specific populations of neurons, our aim is to develop AD and PD therapeutics focusing on designing and synthesizing small molecules that can halt premature cell death.