The Molecular Biology group at the Piramal Healthcare Research Centre plays a major role in drug discovery and translational research through the application of Genomics, Transcriptomics and Proteomics. The activities of the group include:
- Developing disease-specific robust and reliable cell based and high throughput assays suitable for screening molecules
- Cloning and expression of various proteins in prokaryotic and eukaryotic expression systems.
Cloning and expression mainly involves primer design, cloning of ORFs of interest and heterogonous expression of ORF in E.coli, mammalian cells and insect cells for both soluble, insoluble and membrane proteins followed by qualitative and quantitative assay of the gene (cDNA) expression level in each transfected clone for selection of the best expressing clone. Protein purification is a crucial step for projects involving research on structural and functional properties, and the molecular biology group provides proteins with highest level of purity with full functional activity 
Designing and developing mode of action studies to profile lead molecules by using tools such as gene expression profiling, receptor binding, and reporter based assays- Designing and developing simple, cost effective disease models and over expression mutant model like Drosophila for screening assays