Research Insight: Drug Design and Discovery

Abstract

Drug design referred to as rational drug design which is the inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is typically an organic small molecule that activates or inhibits the function of a biomolecule such as a protein, that successively ends up in a therapeutic profit to the patient. Within   the most elementary sense, drug style involves the structure of molecules which are measured in complementary form and are charged to the biomolecular target to which they bind and act. Often Drug design is a computer modeling technique and is referred to as computer-aided drug design. Biopharmaceuticals and therapeutic antibodies are increasingly important class of drugs due to the addition of small molecules. Computational methods have also been developed for improving the affinity, selectivity and stability of these protein based therapeutics.

The rational drug design involves the use of three-dimensional information about biomolecules obtained from such techniques as X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. Computer-aided drug design is easily tractable when there is a high-resolution structure of a target protein bound to a potent ligand. This approach to drug discovery is sometimes referred to as structure–based drug design. The first unequivocal example of the application of structure-based drug design leading to an approved drug is the carbonic anhydrase inhibitor dorzolamide, which was approved in 1995.