Harnessing India’s strengths in the physical/computational/engineering/medical sciences to create a global research network in translational neuroscience 

The challenge

Neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases represent a major and growing global public health threat. The urgent unmet need is for therapies that will prolong and improve/maintain quality of life. The continued failure to discover new medicines reflects bottlenecks at pivotal stages of drug development, and new interdisciplinary approaches in discovery neuroscience.

Mission statement

This institute, based in TCG-CREST Kolkata, is building a network of experts/partnerships distributed across leading international institutions. Our goal is to:

1. Exploit innovative technology based on patient derived neural stem cells to rapidly discover potential new medicines (including repurposed drugs and natural compounds).
2. Prioritize innovations in powerful pre-clinical assay platforms that will examine the effects of disease-induced changes, and interventions against them, in animal models across multiple levels of neural organization.
3. Train the next generation of young Indian scientists from physics, chemistry, various streams of engineering, computational and data sciences to facilitate a cross-disciplinary framework for neuroscience research. This talent pool will be nurtured through collaborations with a global network of leading neuroscience institutions, and exchange/visiting faculty programs.