Research Projects

Diabetes is one of the largest global health problems of this century, ranking among the top 10 leading causes of mortality. New alternatives for diabetes are urgently needed as current therapeutics suffer from issues, such as poor adherence in patients, lack of efficacy and side effects. A novel approach to control diabetes is based on DPP-4 inhibitors, known as gliptins, are a class of oral diabetic medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat type 2 diabetes mellitus in adults. However, their long term use has several side effects. Hence, there is an urgent need to identify more efficient and safer drugs that have less side effects and that shall be safe for long term medication as required in diabetic patients. Plant derived DPP-IV inhibitory bioactive peptides may prove to be an excellent option for this purpose. These peptides may also be part of daily food supplements. Here we propose to identify novel plant based peptide inhibitors against DPP-IV by using a comprehensive computer assisted structure based screening approach.