In March 2017, the Department of Pharmacy, BRAC University organized the First Ever ChemBio HACKATHON in Bangladesh. The event took place from March 28, 2017 to April 01, 2017 at the BRAC University premises. The Award Ceremony will be held on April 16, 2017 at the Global Development Learning Network (GDLN). Nuvista Pharma Limited, Bangladesh contributed to this event.
The ChemBio HACKATHON started with a three day-long training session from March 28, 2017 to March 30, 2017 on computational chemistry and biology. This was followed by the HACKATHON day held on April 01, 2017. During the training session, the participants were able to learn about popular molecular modeling, visualizing and sequencing software. The session provided the students with a firsthand training in solving modern molecular design problems employing in-silico methods and also provided them with enough resources to participate in the final competition.
The participants were the students of the BRAC University, among whom, 33 were from the Department of Pharmacy and 2 were from the Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. The objective of this event was to give the students a hand-on experience regarding bacterial engineering for bioremediation, in-silico drug designing and designing siRNA by RNA interference technology (RNAi). This is also done with the view of preparing the students for future research in this field. In all, the program was a huge success!