The Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences hosted Prof. Jack Tuszyński, a world-renowned bioinformatics scholar from the University of Alberta, Canada, to share his research work in computational drug discovery model with postgraduate students and academics at CUT. 

 

His presentation covered a wide spectrum of issues from the basics to advanced aspects of bioinformatics.  He spoke about an evolution of drug design and development, the computational tools and molecular modeling principles, bioinformatics and protein, molecular dynamics simulations, ligand-based screening, etc. While South Africa and the continent as a whole show lack of research activity in bioinformatics, academics, Prof. Khajamohiddin Syed, Prof. Samson Sitheni Mashele and Dr Dedré Olivier at CUT are leading the way to give birth to a world-renowned bioinformatics and rational drug-designing laboratory in the continent. In 2015, CUT scientists Unit for Drug Discovery attracted the attention of researchers across the world when they discovered a new drug that has a huge potential to help fight aquatic animal infections caused by aquatic parasites. “Bioinformatics is a game changer and will assist staff and students to understand complex biological processes at the molecular level and improved design experiments before they perform in laboratories,” he said. Prof. Tuszyński also said that computational drug discovery is an effective strategy for accelerating and economizing drug discovery and development process. “Computational drug and discovery is the future of the pharmaceutical development. Many universities, government institutions, and pharmaceutical firms have formed bioinformatics groups, consisting of computational biologists and bioinformatics computer scientists. Such groups will be key to unraveling the mass of information generated by large-scale sequencing efforts underway in laboratories around the world,” he concluded. 

 

Prof. Tuszyński is a Fellow of the National Institute for Nanotechnology of Canada. He is an Allard Chair and Professor in Experimental Oncology in the Department of Oncology at the University of Alberta’s Cross Cancer Institute and a Professor in the Department of Physics. He heads an interdisciplinary team that focuses on building “designer drugs” able to kill tumors that eventually lead to improved cancer cures. He is also on the editorial board of a number of international journals including the Journal of Biological Physics, Journal of Biophysics and Structural Biology (JBSB), Quantum Biosystems, Research Letters in Physics, Water: a Multidisciplinary Research Journal and Interdisciplinary Sciences-Computational Life Sciences. 

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1: Prof. Jack Tuszyński, a world-renowned bioinformatics scholar, University of Alberta, Canada during the workshop. 

2: From left: Prof. Syed Khajamohiddin, an Associate Professor: Unit for Drug Discovery Research, Prof. Samson Sitheni Mashele, Dean: Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Prof. Jack  Tuszynki, a world-renowned bioinformatics scholar at the University of Alberta, Canada and Dr Dedré Olivier, Head of Department: Health and Environmental Sciences with CUT staff and students who attended the workshop.