Science | UM PhD student joins anti-Ebola drug design project at Oxford

Faraz Mohammadali Shaikh

Faraz Mohammadali Shaikh, a doctoral student from the University of Macau (UM) Faculty of Science and Technology (FST), has received an internship offer from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Shaikh will participate in a drug design project aimed at fighting the Ebola virus.
Ebola is a highly virulent pathogen which can cause a severe hemorrhagic fever and has a high death rate. According to a UM statement, Shaikh will work on the computational methods needed in designing drugs against Ebola. He will use computer simulations and fragment-
based molecular docking to explore viral activity – in particular how the virus enters the host cell at the atomic level – and investigate ways to effectively inhibit virus attachment and membrane fusion. The goal of the research project is to identify chemical entities to be potential candidates for developing drugs against Ebola.
Shaikh has been working on protein flexibility algorithms and drug design applications in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Lab, headed by Dr Shirley Siu Weng In, since September 2015. He has worked as a senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence at the National Facility for Drug Discovery Complex, Rajkot, India. He received the DBT Senior Research Fellowship from the Indian government from 2013 to 2015. He has published more than ten scientific papers in international journals to date.