Drug Design and Discovery

The process of identifying potential new therapeutic entities utilizing a combination of computational, experimental, translational, and clinical models is known as drug discovery. Despite breakthroughs in biotechnology and our understanding of biological systems, drug development remains a time-consuming, expensive, complex, and inefficient process with a high attrition rate of new therapeutics. Drug design is the process of coming up with new medications based on a biological target's knowledge. Drug design, at its most basic level, is creating molecules that are complimentary in form and charge to the molecular target with which they interact and bind. Preclinical research on cell-based and animal models, as well as clinical studies on people, are all part of drug development and discovery. Finally, regulatory approval is needed to market the drug. Modern drug development includes identifying screening hits, medicinal chemistry, and optimization of those hits to improve affinity, selectivity (to lower the risk of adverse effects), efficacy/potency, metabolic stability (to extend the half-life), and oral bioavailability. Once a molecule meets all of these criteria, it will go through the drug development process before going through clinical trials.

• Computer-aided drug design (CADD)
• In silico Methods
• Principles
• Applications