Please join us in welcoming Dharmeshkumar Patel, CMCI’s newest Collaboratorium Molecular Modeling Postdoctoral Researcher.
Patel has a masters degree in Medicinal Chemistry and earned his PhD from the University of Sydney where he worked on computational study of binding of ion channels inhibitors and protein aggregation. He also has work experience with Piramal Lifesciences Ltd., a drug discovery company based in Maharashtra, India, where he was a member of the team that designed the anticancer clinical candidate P7170. Most recently, Patel was a research officer involved in GPCR modeling at Curtin University in Australia.
At the U of I, Patel is involved in the CMCI Core initiative project of development of free energy calculation algorithm to study thermodynamic properties of different states of biomolecular systems in an efficient and cognizant way.
Committed to a wide variety of modeling projects across campus and around the globe, Patel uses various molecular modeling approaches in computational drug discovery such as virtual screening, molecular docking, pharmacophore mapping, structure based drug design and binding affinity prediction of small molecules. He also has expertise in protein structure analysis, homology modeling and protein-protein interactions. He has experience in ADME and toxicity prediction of drug-like molecules and performs molecular dynamic simulations with enhanced sampling techniques, including umbrellas sampling, metadynamics and ABF simulations to calculate free energy profiles.