Mr Faraz Mohammadali Shaikh, a doctoral student\nfrom the University of Macau (UM) Faculty of Science and Technology (FST), has\nreceived an internship offer from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics\nat the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Shaikh will participate in a drug\ndesign project against the Ebola virus.<\/p>
Ebola is a highly virulent pathogen which can cause\na severe hemorrhagic fever with a high death rate. Shaikh will work on the\ncomputational methods for designing drugs against Ebola. He will use computer simulations\nand fragment-based molecular docking to explore viral activity \u2013 in particular\nhow the virus enters the host cell \u2013 at the atomic level, and investigate ways\nto effectively inhibit virus attachment and membrane fusion. The goal of this\nresearch project is to identify chemical entities as potential candidates for\ndeveloping drugs against Ebola. <\/p>
This project is headed by Prof David Stuart,\ndirector of Oxford\u2019s Division of Structural Biology. The world-class research\ngroup at the division has been focused on solving the complex problem of\nstructure-function relationship of viruses of different sizes, and the puzzles\nof virus-receptor interactions and virus assembly, with innovative experimental\nand computational techniques. <\/p>
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Shaikh has been working on protein flexibility\nalgorithms and drug design applications in the Computational Biology and\nBioinformatics Lab, headed by Dr Shirley Siu Weng In, since September 2015. He\nhas worked as a senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence at the National\nFacility for Drug Discovery Complex, Rajkot, India. He received the DBT Senior\nResearch Fellowship from the Indian government from 2013 to 2015. So far he has\npublished more than ten papers in international journals.<\/p>
Source: Faculty of Science and Technology
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