To promote drug discovery and development research in India, CSIR-Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow instituted the CDRI Awards in the year 2004 to promote scientific excellence in the country and to recognise outstanding contributions in the area of Drug Research and Development.

These prestigious awards are given annually to Indian Nationals below 45 years of age who have carried out outstanding research work in the area having a direct bearing on Drug Research and Development. There are two separate individual awards in the area of Chemical Sciences and Life Sciences. Each award carries a cash prize of Rs 20000/- and a citation.

These awardees are usually nominated by the head of Institutions/Organisations/Universities/Industries, Bhatnagar Awardees, Fellows of National Science Academies. A committee comprising eminent scientists scrutinise the nomination/application and select the CDRI Awardee.

This year’s awardees are as follows:

Dr Vishal Rai's work on precision engineering of proteins for enabling biology and medicine paved the way for his CDRI award 2021

Dr Vishal Rai is working in the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal.

In his award oration, he highlighted his journey and specific milestones that led to the development of a comprehensive platform for the precision engineering of proteins.

The chemical toolkit for investigating biological systems or enabling therapeutics requires the precise covalent attachment of tags to the proteins. In this perspective, his team has been leading the efforts toward chemical technologies to enable precise control over the site of bioconjugation. The critical barrier involves the simultaneous deconvolution of multiple challenges associated with reactivity and selectivity. In this perspective, he has developed a DisINtegrate or DIN theory that allows creation of new reactivity landscapes on a protein's surface. 

Overall, it enabled the development of methods for (a) utilisation of N-terminus as a reactivity hotspot, (b) single-site tagging of amino acid like Lys or His, (c) N-Gly residue-specific labelling (Gly-Tag®), and (d) modular linchpin directed modification (LDM®) for labelling single His, Lys, or Asp residue. 

These chemical technologies deliver the single-site installation of various probes in native proteins. The user-friendly protocols result in analytically pure labelled proteins. The structure, enzymatic activity, binding to receptors, and downstream signalling pathways are typically unaffected. Importantly, these technologies allow access to homogeneous Antibody-drug Conjugates (ADCs) for directed cancer chemotherapeutics and fluorophore conjugates (AFCs) for imaging-guided tumour surgery. 

Dr Siddhesh S. Kamat bagged CDRI award 2021 for his contribution towards understanding a human neurological disorder using the chemical biology approach

Dr Sidhdesh S. Kamat is working in the Department of Biology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune.

Polyneuropathy, Hearing loss, Ataxia, Retinitis pigmentosa, and Cataract (PHARC) is an autosomal recessive human genetic neurological disorder caused by deleterious (null) mutations to the abhd12 gene that encodes an integral membrane serine hydrolase enzyme ABHD12, a major and to date, only verified lysophosphatidylserine (lyso-PS) lipase. In his talk, he discussed his chemical biology approaches towards understanding and mapping the molecular mechanisms of lyso-PS lipids that drive the pathology of this disease, and posit new therapeutic paradigms in rectifying this early-onset neurological disorder.

Dr Chandrima Das's outstanding work on Decoding the Epigenetic Landscape by the ‘Histone Readers’ and their Implications in Human Diseases, paved the way for her CDRI award 2021

Dr Chandrima Das is presently working in Biophysics and Structural Genomics Division, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata.

Epigenetic modifications are recognised by a ubiquitous class of proteins called “readers/effectors” which has become an important paradigm in chromatin biology. Recruitment of these chromatin readers to the selective histone post-translational modification sites onto chromatin is instrumental in the association or stabilisation of various other protein complexes.

This association significantly impacts all the essential DNA-templated processes including transcription, repair, recombination and replication. Epigenetic deregulations altering gene expressions are frequently observed in human diseases.

The research focus of her Chromatin Dynamics Laboratory is to understand some of these histone readers in the context of cellular functions and a possible connection to pathogenesis, including metabolic as well as infectious diseases. She observed that chromatin readers are intricately involved in reprogramming the epigenetic landscape of chromatin and could steer the gene expression programme to re-set the balance towards the healthy state of a cell and has an immense potential to be exploited in the therapeutic regimen.