Seminar by Dr. Rahul Singh (San Francisco State University)

Speaker: Dr. Rahul Singh                                                                                                                                   

               San Francisco State University

Title: Algorithms for the phenome: furthering drug discovery for neglected parasitic diseases

Date: Friday October 13, 2017

Time: 10:30 -11:30AM

Room:EV 3.309 

ABSTRACT

Drug discovery constitutes one of the most complex endeavors in modern science. In this context, finding cures for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) is an especially difficult challenge. This class of diseases encompasses a number of infection categories including helminth infections, protozoan infections, bacterial infections, and viral infections. Cumulatively, these diseases impact a significant majority of the world’s population and various studies have indicated NTDs to be the prime factors depriving the affected people of their health and economic potential.

In this talk I will present the emerging idea of applying algorithms to analyze the phenome of parasites obtained via precise chemical probing. Here, we understand the phenome to encompass any observable effect occurring in the parasite due to chemical insult. Our discourse will focus on the etiological agent of one of the most significant tropical diseases called schistosomiasis to show how algorithms have been able to solve a historically long-standing problem that had bottlenecked the drug discovery process in this disease area. 

BIO

Rahul Singh is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at San Francisco State University and Professor by affiliation, at the Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases, University of California, San Diego. His technical interests are in computational drug discovery, bioinformatics, computational epidemiology, and multimedia information modeling and analysis. The current thrust of Professor Singh's research activities lies in developing algorithmic techniques and computational infrastructure that are especially of value in curing the neglected diseases of humankind.

Dr. Singh received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota and his diplom, from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Prior to joining academia, he was a scientist at Scimagix Inc. Earlier, he was a scientist at Exelixis Inc, where he founded and headed the computational drug discovery group. At Scimagix, Dr. Singh co-designed the ProteinMine^TM software which received the Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. His research in Exelixis has, in part, led to the development of two marketed Oncology drugs.