......The future vision of CDRI is that of a globally competitive state-of-the-art laboratory for drug research. To achieve this, CDRI is currently pursuing an ambitious programme for modernisation of its facilities and capability and a new state-of-the-art campus.

Interest in plants as a source of new drugs has gained popularity in recent years. In India, the ancient system of medicine, Ayurveda exists as a treasure of knowledge on medicinal plants. There exists a major opportunity to utilize this ancient wisdom for developing new plant-based modern medicines and herbal remedies using the available technologies. The CDRI is pursuing a programme to develop plant-based modern drugs and herbal remedies using sophisticated tools.

The recent approaches in drug research focus on the need for basic research at molecular level. Understanding the pathophysiology of a disease provides valuable information for the design and discovery of novel drug molecules. The newer approach in drug discovery now necessitates the search of molecular targets for development of reliable and quicker in vitro test systems using high throughput screening (HTS) techniques and also for development of mechanism - based highly target selective drugs. A HTS system has been installed recently at CDRI for this purpose.

On the chemistry side, efforts are directed at the discovery of novel molecular structures, through the use of combinatorial chemical synthesis, which is already in place and progressing very well. Plants are now considered valuable for providing new chemical lead structures and for their development as drugs. Therefore, the facilities in natural product research are being strengthened.

A new facility for structural biology research has been created. The facility includes a wet laboratory housed with state-of-the art equipments for cloning/expression and purification of proteins, a modern X-ray laboratory with diffractometer system for small molecules, system for macromolecule x-ray crystallography, a precision camera for preliminary diffraction work and a computer graphics laboratory with silicon graphics and personal computers for molecular modelling and crystallographic computations. The facility will be utilized for atomic-level structure determinations of proteins and small molecules of biological and structural importance. It will facilitate knowledge-based drug design through molecular modelling which is an integral part of the modern drug design approaches.