What makes a good drug target?

HER2 Overexpression in Retinoblastoma: A Potential Therapeutic Target

“…Although some conventional therapies targeting multiple pathways had already led to some important successes in medicine [29] , highly selective therapies are now at the frontline of the drug discovery industry since their adverse events can be significantly reduced [30] . The first step in drug discovery is the identification of a novel drug target.…”

“…As is the case for the HER2 protein with trastuzumab, other extracellular proteins and cell-surface receptors are potentially good targets for selective biologic therapies. The idea is to guide the cytotoxic response to a selected location in the disease tissue, where the antigen is expressed [30] . In breast cancer, the success of trastuzumab therapy significantly improved the disease-free and overall survival of women with tumors overexpressing HER2 in both early and metastatic breast cancer [31] .…”

Pemanfaatan bioinformatika dalam bidang pertanian dan kesehatan (The utilization of bioinformatics in the field of agriculture and health)

“…Target yang "druggable" merupakan protein, peptide atau asam nukleat dengan aktivitas yang dapat dimodulasi oleh senyawa obat. Biasanya dapat terdiri dari senyawa kimia molekul kecil (SMOL) atau biologis (BIOL) seperti antibodi atau protein rekombinan (Gashaw et al, 2011). Konsep dari analisis bioinformatika tersebut berbasis pada "hits" seperti yang biasa dilakukan dalam BLAST.…”

Maximizing computational tools for successful drug discovery

“…Protein interaction network are known to moderate cellular signaling via interaction between proteins and pathologically significant protein--protein interaction therefore serve as promising drug targets [59]. Modulation of gene expression may be an alternative therapeutic route by indirectly tackling a target protein by controlling its amount rather than influencing its activity, which may be attractive in cases when modulating the activity is a formidable challenge (i.e., highly drug-resistant target or targets that lack a suitable binding site) [60,61].…”