Padmabhushan awardee Professor Sukhdev, a renowned natural products chemist of India, inaugurated the conference while Dr Harkishan Singh, Professor Emeritus, Panjab University, was the guest of honour.
Nearly 45 scientists and speakers, besides 350 delegates from across the globe have been invited to attend the five-day conference.
Professor Sukhdev said: “There is a great scope of the study of natural product in the present times as several therapeutic active molecules are widely used as drugs for many diseases, which are extracted from nature.”
He added that there are numerous outstanding molecules, but as their use is limited, therefore, scientists need to work in this area. He appealed to the international participants, especially the youth to take up the opportunity to discover new drugs, which are found in abundant quantities in nature.
Professor P Rama Rao, NIPER director, made an appeal to the scientists to accept the challenges being faced by the pharma industry and requested them to come up with new drug discovery in the field of natural products and traditional medicine. He said this conference will serve as a platform and provide an opportunity to the participants to find out about the new developments in this field.
Professor David Kingston, Virgina Tech University, USA, said natural products form 25 per cent of the existing drugs.