Abstract

RECENT ADAVANCES IN DRUG DISCOVERY - IN SILICO TECHNIQUES

Spoorthi Pohar* and P. Shashikala

ABSTRACT

In drug development, it is very important to evaluate the potential toxicological risk of a drug as early as possible to reduce costs and time in drug development process. In Silico methods, refer to methods or prediction using computational approaches. In Silico methods have the advantage that they can make fast predictions for a large set of compounds in a high throughput mode. A theoretical and computational method that are used to model or mimic the behavior of molecules is considered as Molecular Modeling. This modeling process is referred as Computer aided drug design (CADD). One of the major application of Drug design refers to rational drug design process which is a resourceful process to identify prospective molecules as drug candidates based on the knowledge of its biological target and the mode of interaction. Present review discusses the recent successful applications of structure-based or ligand-based methods, ligand-based pharmacophores, molecular descriptors and quantitative structure-activity relationships.

Keywords: In Silico methods, Molecular modeling, Rational drug design.