Single-cell and network pharmacology study presented at IEEE BECITHCON 2026
Musab Shahriar, Group Leader for In Silico Drug Discovery at CHIRAL Bangladesh, presented our collaborative study at IEEE BECITHCON 2026 — the IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Engineering, Computer and Information Technology for Health.
Single-Cell Transcriptomic and Network Pharmacology Insights into the Therapeutic Potential of Withania somnifera-Derived Phytochemicals Against Cisplatin-Resistant Ovarian Cancer
Cisplatin remains the backbone of treatment for high-grade ovarian carcinoma, and relapse after resistance emerges is what most often decides the outcome. Resistance is not a property of the tumour as a whole but of particular cell states within it, which is why the study starts at single-cell resolution rather than with bulk expression.
What the study does
The work joins two analyses that are usually run apart. Single-cell RNA sequencing of ovarian cancer cohorts is used to resolve the cell states present in resistant tumours and the transcriptional programmes that separate them from sensitive ones, yielding a set of resistance-associated targets grounded in the cells that actually carry the phenotype.
Those targets then become the anchor for a network pharmacology screen of bioactive phytochemicals from Withania somnifera (ashwagandha), narrowed by molecular docking and structural dynamics to compounds with plausible binding to resistance-associated signalling. The result is a set of compound–target hypotheses for natural-product adjuvants, each traceable back to the cell population that motivated it — computational evidence to be tested, not a therapy.
The team
The work was carried out in the Big Bioinformatics Lab, part of the centre’s computational biology division. Congratulations to the full team:
- Sheikh Naem Islam Abhi
- Musab Shahriar — presenter, Group Leader, In Silico Drug Discovery
- Lamia Hasan Joarder Barsha
- Mst. Afsana Meme
- Md. Jubayer Hossain — supervisor and founder