Gaurav Chopra

Biography

Dr. Gaurav Chopra, is employed as an Assistant Professor of Department of Chemistry at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. from Ph.D., 2010, Stanford University (Michael Levitt). His research interests include: to develop and verify multiscale chemical models of cellular systems for therapeutic discovery by integrating sequence, structure, function, interaction, and systems-based methodologies. Our lab is a hybrid computational and wet-lab to identify drugs by taking into account all possible interactions between biomolecules, namely, interactome based drug discovery. We will focus on designing disease-specific compounds interacting with multiple proteomes and biomolecular interfaces (protein/protein and protein/nucleic-acid interfaces) and identifying compounds that change the fate and proliferation of cell types in vivo by developing structural/chemical signatures of individual cells. Specifically, we will start by repurposing human approved compounds and designing new compounds to perturb the immune system to identify therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Developing computational chemistry/biology tools and using physical chemistry principles fuel the research work that we do. The experimental validations of the computational predictions will be done in our laboratory, together with existing and new collaborators. Our lab will make use of high performance computing to generate predictions, use high-throughput robotic set-up for compound screening on cell assays, use molecular biology techniques & sequencing (RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq etc.), flow cytometry instrumentation as needed to select and test computational and in vitro validated predictions in mice.

Research Interest

to develop and verify multiscale chemical models of cellular systems for therapeutic discovery by integrating sequence, structure, function, interaction, and systems-based methodologies