Abstract

CONVENTIONAL METHOD OF DRUG DESIGN AND DISCOVERY

Dhobale Gayatri Balasaheb, Pagar Pooja Vishal*, Jadhav Priyanka Shivaji and Sneha Sandip Patil

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Abstract

The process of drug discovery is very complex and requires an interdisciplinary effort to design effective and commercially feasible drugs. The objective of drug design is to find a chemical compound that can fit to a specific cavity on a protein target both geometrically and chemically. After passing the animal tests and human clinical trials, this compound becomes a drug available to patients. The conventional drug design methods include random screening of chemicals found in nature or synthesized in laboratories. The problems with this method are long design cycle and high cost. Modern approach including structure-based drug design with the help of informatics technologies and computational methods has speeded up the drug discovery process in an efficient manner. An improved generation of software’s with easy operation and superior computational tools to generate chemically stable and worthy compounds with refinement capability has been developed. These tools can tap into cheminformation to shorten the cycle of drug discovery, and thus make drug discovery more cost-effective. The conventional drug discovery and development also include the traditional methods of drug discovery and development which contains the medicinal systems like Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Siddha and Unani. This chapter gives a brief view about the random screening, serendipitous drug discovery, trial and error method and ethno pharmacological approach and classical pharmacological aspects in conventional drug discovery methods. The chapter also include the target identification and validation.

Keywords: Random screening, ethanol pharmacology, traditional, Ayurveda, serendipity, classical pharmacology.