Shimla, May 13 (IANS): A team of scientists from a university in Himachal Pradesh has been offered a grant through Microsoft to conduct research on finding drugs to cure and prevent Covid-19.

This project will directly influence the anti-viral drug development.

It has been funded through High Performance Computing Consortium and the team is led by Gurjot Kaur, Associate Professor, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Shoolini University. It will have access to Microsoft Azure credits for six months to perform work using Microsoft licensed resources like online platform and virtual machines.

The team will perform much-needed screening of phytochemical constituents for anti-viral activity through interaction with Covid-19 specific targets using molecular modeling studies.

Indian medicinal herbs have same or similar phytoconstituents and do show great promise as anti-Covid-19 drugs.

This project will directly influence the anti-viral drug development for Covid-19 and thus has high impact, said the university on Wednesday.