Novel Strategies to Accelerate the Drug Design and Discovery Process

Introduction

Drug discovery is a tedious and prolonged process involving the collaborative work of various departments and huge monetary investments. A holistic understanding of the pathology of disease by employing molecular medicine principles could be instrumental in identifying novel targets and fostering promising therapeutics into the pipeline. Medicinal chemistry plays a crucial role in the preclinical stage of the drug discovery process by designing and synthesizing novel molecules that can potentially modulate the targets of interest. High-throughput screening (HTS) in combination with molecular modeling tools like Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) is essential in early-stage drug discovery for screening millions of compounds against various biological targets to identify leads for drug development. In recent years, drug repurposing has attracted the attention of many researchers as this approach offers several advantages, such as reducing the time and cost of drug development, leveraging existing safety data, and potentially bringing new treatment options to market more quickly. Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras (PROTACs) is yet another promising strategy that has emerged as a hope to develop molecules to target "undruggable" proteins. Owing to the increased drug resistance in recent years, there is a dire need to expedite the drug design and discovery process to develop safe and effective therapies to cater for the global population.

Keywords

Drug design, QSAR, ADME, Drug repurposing, PROTACs, Novel targets

Sub-topics

·       New frontiers in small molecule drug discovery

·       Identification and validation of novel druggable therapeutic targets

·       Applications of Cryo-EM in facilitating the drug discovery process

·       Advancements in hit-to-lead optimization

·       Targeted protein degradation: Advancements and future directions of Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras (PROTACs)

·       Novel therapeutics to tackle antimicrobial resistance

·       Advancements and challenges in repurposing of drugs

·       Progress and future directions in cancer chemotherapy