No abstract

Over the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have seen a decline in the number of drug candidates successfully passing through clinical trials, though billions are still spent on drug development. Poor aqueous solubility leads to low bio-availability, reducing pharmaceutical effectiveness. The human cost of inefficient drug candidate testing is of great medical concern, with fewer drugs making it to the production line, slowing the development of new treatments. In biochemistry and biophysics, water mediated reactions and interactions within active sites and protein pockets are an active area of research, in which methods for modelling solvated systems are continually pushed to their limits. Here, we discuss a multitude of methods aimed towards solvent modelling and solubility prediction, aiming to inform the reader of the options available, and outlining the various advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

In recent literature, some authors claim to have successfully applied density functional theory (DFT) methods to the attractive interaction between rare-gas atoms. In this note, we make a critical survey of these works and come to the conclusion that, in contrast to the claims made, state-of-the-art DFT methods are incapable of accounting for dispersion effects in a quantitative way.