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Molecular Genetics Thalassaemia Department awarded a two year grant through the RPF

The Molecular Genetics Thalassaemia Department has been awarded a two year grant through the Research Promotion Foundation (RPF) as part of the EU Structural Funds initiative in order to apply novel chemoinformatic methods in the search for new drugs for the treatment of β-thalassaemia.

In Cyprus and the Mediterranean region in general, Thalassaemia is a common hereditary blood disorder that is lethal if left untreated. The current treatment consists of regular, life-long blood transfusions and iron chelation therapy. This is an enormous imposition on the patients’ quality of life, and costly in terms of resources. Furthermore, complications are still prominent, especially among non-compliant patients. Although pharmacological agents which aid in the treatment of Thalassaemia exist, they are of limited efficacy. New, more effective medication, will vastly improve patients’ quality of life and reduce the burden on the healthcare services in all the countries where Thalasaemia is prevalent.
The objective of the project is the identification and/or design of chemical agents with potential therapeutic value for the treatment of β-thalassaemia which

will be safer and more effective than currently used drugs by crossing the principles of biology and information technology within a chemoinformatics framework. Chemoinformatics is the mixing of those information resources to transform data into information and information into knowledge for the intended purpose of making better and faster decisions in the area of drug lead identification and optimization.

A key objective of the project is the development and application of ‘state of the art’ chemoinformatics techniques for the identification and optimization of potential agents for the treatment of Thalassaemia. One of the main goals of this project is to develop fast, accurate, reliable and robust computational models for the computer-aided design of small compounds and use these models to construct a prioritized list of compounds with high potential for the treatment of Thalassaemia. This methodology will speed up the drug discovery process and will allow a more focused approach to the task of screening for new pharmacological agents in the absence of a known biological target. This approach can be used as a model for drug discovery in many other diseases.