Drug Discovery in the Next Millennium

Abstract

Selection and validation of novel molecular targets have become of paramount importance in light of the plethora of new potential therapeutic drug targets that have emerged from human gene sequencing. In response to this revolution within the pharmaceutical industry, the development of high-throughput methods in both biology and chemistry has been necessitated. This review addresses these technological advances as well as several new areas that have been created by necessity to deal with this new paradigm, such as bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and functional genomics. With many of these key components of future drug discovery now in place, it is possible to map out a critical path for this process that will be used into the new millennium.

Beyond the Genome: A Drug for Every Gene?

“…The information produced from both public and private genome programs already provides a powerful foundation for future exploitation of genes as targets in drug discovery [3] and comprehensive mining of the human genome for therapeutic targets has uncovered a wealth of new opportunities for exploitation in molecular pharmacology and mechanism-based drug discovery [4].…”

“…The most comprehensive example of this has undoubtedly been the task of sequencing and assembling the human genome[1,2], a feat that lay at the very edge of our ability to handle such complex computational tasks. Assigning function to the individual genes within the genome is a continuing challenge.The information produced from both public and private genome programs already provides a powerful foundation for future exploitation of genes as targets in drug discovery [3] and comprehensive mining of the human genome for therapeutic targets has uncovered a wealth of new opportunities for exploitation in molecular pharmacology and mechanism-based drug discovery [4]. …”

In Silico Protein-Ligand Docking Studies on Thiazolidinediones as Potential Anticancer Agents

“…With the availability of the 3D structure of a biological target, it is feasible to use a structure-based approach to evaluate and predict the binding mode of a ligand within the active site of the receptor with docking methods [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Now it is a popular technique used for increasing the speed of drug designing process.…”

Multi-algorithm and multi-model based drug target prediction and web server

“…Drug target identification and validation is typically the first step in the drug discovery process [1] . The estimated number of drug targets in the human proteome ranges from nearly 3000 to more than 10 000 [2][3][4] .…”