What to expect from rational drug design

Fundamental considerations in drug design

The drug discovery paradigm has been very time-consuming, challenging, and expensive; however, the disease conditions originating from bacteria, virus, protozoa, fungus and other microorganisms are steadily shooting up. For instance, COVID-19 is the latest viral infection that affects millions of people and the world’s economy very severely. Therefore, the quest for discovery of novel and potent drug compounds against deadly pathogens is crucial at the moment. Despite a lot of drawbacks in drug discovery and development and its pertaining technology, the advancement must be taken into account so the time duration and cost would be minimized. In this chapter, basic principles in drug design and discovery have been discussed together with advances in drug development.

Advances in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for Drug Discovery

BACKGROUND: Drug discovery is a complex and unpredictable endeavor with a high failure rate. Current trends in the pharmaceutical industry have exasperated these challenges and are contributing to the dramatic decline in productivity observed over the last decade. The industrialization of science by forcing the drug discovery process to adhere to assembly-line protocols is imposing unnecessary restrictions, such as short project time-lines. Recent advances in nuclear magnetic resonance are responding to these self-imposed limitations and are providing opportunities to increase the success rate of drug discovery. OBJECTIVE/METHOD: A review of recent advancements in NMR technology that have the potential of significantly impacting and benefiting the drug discovery process will be presented. These include fast NMR data collection protocols and high-throughput protein structure determination, rapid protein-ligand co-structure determination, lead discovery using fragment-based NMR affinity screens, NMR metabolomics to monitor in vivo efficacy and toxicity for lead compounds, and the identification of new therapeutic targets through the functional annotation of proteins by FAST-NMR. CONCLUSION: NMR is a critical component of the drug discovery process, where the versatility of the technique enables it to continually expand and evolve its role. NMR is expected to maintain this growth over the next decade with advancements in automation, speed of structure calculation, in-cell imaging techniques, and the expansion of NMR amenable targets.