STATE TIMES NEWS
JAMMU: Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (CSIR-IIIM) Jammu celebrated 60th Foundation Day here on Friday.
Dr Harinarayan Rao, Senior Vice President at Reliance Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, was the Chief Guest.
As part of celebrations, different cultural and sports activities were held in which scientific, technical, administrative staff besides research scholars and students participated.
On this occasion, about 600 students from different colleges and schools of Jammu city were also taken on a guided visit to the various research divisions and medicinal farms of the institute.
The scientists and technical staff have demonstrated their indoor and field research activities to the visiting students and other dignitaries.
In the Director IIIM Jammu function held here, Dr Ram Vishwakarma described Dr. Harinarayan Rao as a scientist of international repute and highlighted his scientific achievements.
Dr Rao delivered a lecture titled ‘Of Mice and Men: In pursuit of Drug discovery’.
Rao stated that invaluable contribution of animals in drug development programmes, cancer therapeutics has attracted several criticisms due to high failure rate in the clinical trials.
The cancer drug development studies extensively used either syngeneic murine tumors or xenograft studies in immuno deficient mice. He elaborated on generation of Genetically Engineered Mice (GEM) by DNA recombinant technology and Patient Derived Xenograft (PDX) models are the latest development in generation of animal models in cancer and envisaged that for drug discovery and development, the search for more suitable animal models will continue in the future.
Heads of various divisions of IIIM present on the occasion were Dr D.M Mondhe Senior Principal Scientist, Dr. I Khan Principal Scientist, Dr. G.D Singh (Principal Scientist), Dr. Zabeer Ahmed (Principal Scientist), Sanjay Sharma (Library Officer), Dr. Parthasarthi Das and Praphul Kumar (SPO), Dr Y.S Bedi, (Ex-Chief Scientist) and a number of farmers were special guests at this function.
Dr. D.M Mondhe, Head Cancer Pharmacology Division presented vote of thanks and Dr. Deepika Singh conducted the proceedings.
