2. Drug designing in novel drug discovery: Trends, scope and relevance
Meenakshi Rajpoot, Rajasri Bhattacharyya, Girish Kumar Gupta, Anil Kumar Sharma · 2016
The severity of diseases gives rise to the need to develop new ideas for the discovery of drugs. Traditional drug development methods have been very costly and time consuming that is why computer-assisted methods have taken a center stage: they help in accelerating the whole process of drug development. Novel drugs are designed according to the specific protein target that plays an important role in a particular biological activity. Modern drug designing is based on receptor-ligand interactions according to which the drug binds inside the receptor’s binding pocket and modulates its function. Drug development relies on two main approaches - structurebased and ligand-based. If the 3D structure of the drug target or receptor is available, then drug designing is done on the basis of the structural information and it is called structure-based drug designing. But if the 3D structure of the receptor is not available then drugs are developed with the help of 3D QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationships) and pharmacophore methods, which is known as ligand-based drug designing. New drugs can also be synthesized inside the binding pockets of the receptor, called de novo drug design. The current chapter gives an update on recent developments in the field of drug designing paving the way for novel drug discoveries.