Rishi will focus on antibacterial and antifungal programs. While most pharmaceutical companies have halted drug discovery in this field, emerging resistance to existing drugs and unmet therapeutic needs still present significant market opportunities. Animal models for infectious diseases are highly predictive of clinical outcome, and compounds that attain success in Phase II clinical evaluation have the great likelihood of achieving clinical success.
Rishi will control risk by focusing on the identification of novel classes of compounds directed towards well accepted targets. Modern drug discovery tools including structure based drug design and computational chemistry have not been applied to a number of well studied antibacterial and antifungal targets, and Rishi believes that there is a great deal of scientific opportunity in this arena. For example, in recent years, three new classes of antibacterial drugs directed towards well established biological targets have been approved by the FDA.
