The Bioinformatics facility of ACTREC provides infrastructural and technical support to scientists, clinicians and research scholars of the Centre to fulfil the bioinformatics requirements of their on-going research projects. Scientists of the Centre also use the facility’s infrastructure to explore microarray, next generation sequence data analysis, database development, molecular modelling and data mining for their on-going projects.

This facility receives strong funding support from DBT and is established as a BTIS-net centre of this region. It is well equipped with one nVIDIA Tesla GPU workstation, 5 workstations, 1 webserver and seven PCs. The facility also focuses on database development such as Histome: the human infobase; this database is presently being updated. In the domain of gene expression studies, projects related to TGCA database mining and analysis are under progress. In silico molecular modelling, dynamics and protein-protein interactions have been performed using BARC’s supercomputing facility.

The facility hosted a national 28th BTISnet Coordinators Meeting on 3rd and 4th February 2017. The facility also organized its annual 2-day Workshop on ‘Basics of Bioinformatics’ targeting college teachers and research scholars of institutions in the Mumbai and neighboring areas on 2nd and 3rd March 2017. The facility staff also provided training to six trainees during the year, three for Bachelor’s/ Master’s dissertation and three for experience.

The Anti-Cancer Drug Screening Facility (ACDSF) at ACTREC supports the efforts of anti-cancer drug development in India, with in vitro and in vivo anti-cancer drug screening assays that have been developed in-house. ACDSF has 53 human tumor cell lines, 10 murine tumor models and 38 xenograft models for carrying out drug screening. During 2017, 1345 compounds were received from 161 clients including eight corporate R&D organizations from 13 states across India. In all, 1287 compounds were tested for their in vitro activity and 58 compounds were examined for MTD (n=14) and in vivo efficacy assays (n=44).

Two new xenografts namely KG-1 (leukemia) and HCC1954 (breast cancer) were developed during the report year. The facility has successfully completed XII-plan CSIR funded project ‘Affordable cancer therapeutics’ in collaboration with IICT, Hyderabad (2012-17). Of the second set of 300 compounds, 11 compounds were found to be active against four cancer cell lines (Hep-G2, HT-29, SCC-29B and PLC-Prf-5).

Three of these compounds that were most active against oral cancer spheroids (CSC) were further tested for their in vivo efficacy against oral cancer xenograft AW13516. Only one of these (AKL-JA) was found to be strongly active against the AW13516 xenograft. Corroborative evidence was obtained through PET-CT imaging of tumor bearing animals and histopathology of tumor sections.