Question

Quite often scientists make reference to the concept of "rational drug design". But what exactly does this mean? Are we truly in the age of "rational drug design" or has advancement in the field of drug development progressed little in the last fifty years? Please discuss.

Answer 1

Rational drug design refers to the development of medication based on structure and function of target molecule. Unlike traditional drug discovery method which relies on trial and error test on animal, rational drug design starts with the modulation of specific biological target.

Biomolecule which are selected need to have two essential piece of information. Modulation of target will have to be disease modifier and the target should be druggable. After choosing suitable target molecule it is cloned and purified. Purified protein is then used to establish a screening assay and three dimensional structure of target is being determined.

Rational drug design age:

From the early development of drug to modern age computational structure of drug designing chemists seems to have come a long way to find the most effective route for treatment. Early drug development was trail and error method whereas rational drug design depends on structure optimization. Corwin Hansch in 1960s developed a systematic approach of drug design by using knowledge of molecule's activity correlated with its substituents.

In last few decades rational drug design shifted with structure based drug design and high throughput screening. But a lot of missing information is needed to use them as suitable candidate to be used as drug. Accurate calculation, X ray stucture, bioinformatics and molecular modelling are needed to increase the quality of the homology models. Molecular docking based combined approach is being now targeted to achieve the desired result.

Modern day genomic investigation and translational research have identifies a lot of other target molecules. New pharmaceutical knowledge must also help to discover new drugs otherwise health care improvement will fade away. Homology modelling, docking and virtual screening will be successfully combined to accelerate drug discovery.

But lastly billion dollars of money is required in this in silico drug development technologies. So, pharmaceutical companies should take necessary action so that this approach reach for the benefit of the society.