India
Assistant Professor,
Department of Biotechnology,
Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni College For Women.
Sushil Middha
Address:
Assistant Professor,
Department of Biotechnology,
Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni College For Women,
18th Cross, Malleswaram,
Bangalore-12.
Research Interests:
- Diabetes
- Therapeutics applications of Pomegranate Peel and Bamboo research
- Drug Designning
Biography:
- The journey of research in my life is being carried out on two thrust areas of applied biosciences namely pharmaceutical molecules from plants for Diabetes Mellitus (DM) and systems biology with its application in drug discovery.
- In the process, I first started with antioxidant estimation in several culinary and medicinal herbs as a marker of anti-diabetic property and based on those investigations, I also constructed a bioinformatics’ database of around 750 plant species namely PHYTOMELLITUS.
- In the course, I identified pomegranate peel extracts (PPE), a domestic waste, as one of the best sources of antioxidants with the highest anti-diabetic property when evaluated in vivo/in vitro.
- Recent trends in pharmaceutical sciences, as well as drug discovery practices and approaches, indicate the molecular revival of natural therapies in the times ahead.
- A large number of prescribed pharmaceuticals either are direct plant compounds or the derivatives thereof.
- Interestingly, almost all of these molecules have a very high degree of complexity in their structures which renders their chemical synthesis commercially unfeasible.
- Therefore, my lab is involved in the process of isolation of pelargonidin 3-glucoside, a natural compound from PPE, which can act as a drug candidate for DM.
- The second area using systems biology involves networking of colon cancer genes as a drug target and mapping of natural compounds for this network which can also lead to drug discovery.