Bioinformatics & Drug Design group [BIDD] is a research group based in the Computational Science Department, Science Faculty, National University of Singapore. Our group is active in areas of computer-aided drug design, computational biology and bioinformatics.

We have been developing computational methods, software and databases for drug discovery, protein function prediction and molecular modeling. Our research has led to one patent being filed in the US (INTRO reference no. 6011), four bioinformatics databases launched, and over 58 papers published in international journals.

Our group developed a novel computational method and software, INVDOCK, for the prediction of drug targets, therapeutic effects, pharmacokinetics, and adverse drug reactions. This method is useful in facilitating computer-based high-throughput design, safety evaluation and pharmacokinetics testing of drugs and drug candidates. It may also be used in probing the mechanism of therapeutic agents with unknown mechanism, particularly those agents from traditional medicinal plants. Thus it finds application in facilitating our understanding of how traditional medicines and other herbal medicines work.

Our bioinformatics databases provide comprehensive information about drugs, herbal drugs, therapeutically targeted proteins, ADME and toxicity related proteins, drug-protein binding features, the function and other relevant information of these drug-related proteins.

We have close links with the industry and have been actively collaborating with biotechnology and pharmaceutical corporations. For instance we have on-going projects with ISIS Pharmaceuticals (USA) on antisense drug discovery, Origenix Technologies (Canada) on antibacterial drug development, and Chengdu DiAo Pharmaceuticals (China) on Chinese medicinal plant drugs.

We also have academic collaborations with University of Toledo (biophysics) and Purdue University (biophysics) in the US, Institute of Biomaterials and bioengineering Tokyo Medical and Dental University (Drug discovery) in Japan, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica Chinese Academy of Science (Chinese medicinal herbs), ChongQing University (biophysics and bioinformatics), SiChuan University (bioinformatics and drug design), Dalian University of Technology (biophysics) in China.

Our group members are also active in teaching bioinformatics and other computational courses for both undergraduate and graduate students in a number of Departments at NUS.