Case Study Designing Drug Virtually

CASE SUMMARY

Pharmaceutical companies and medical researcher are constantly trying to find new drugs that will provide better treatments especially for cancer and other serious illness. Drug development, testing and administration are information-intensive area with varying computing needs.

In this case, the experience of the medical research engaged in drug discovery by showing how technology can benefit the business performance through the acquisition and application of knowledge. In order to success and survive in all areas of business including medical research, it is vital to facilitate access to knowledge, improving the quality and currency of knowledge as well as using that knowledge to improve the business processes. It is challenging to develop new drugs because drug discovery process is so painstaking and complicated. Traditional method was not very accurate or effective and depended too much on trial-and-error. However, the processes of drug discovery have been changed by the development of new processes for visualizing and design new drugs as well as the use of powerful computers and information technology.

QUESTION 1 : Why are computers so important in drug discovery?

• Previously, traditional methods of drug discovery rely on trial-and-error testing of chemical substances on cultured cells or animals, and matching the apparent effects to treatments.
• The traditional drug discovery processes are painstaking and complicated. It is take a lot of time and a lot of process and too much trial-and-error.
• Drug discovery and development is an intense, lengthy and an interdisciplinary endeavour. Drug development companies tried to speed up the process by creating huge libraries of potential compounds and using robots to quickly review hundreds of thousands of sample to see if any worked. For the pharmaceutical industry, the number of years to bring a drug from discovery to market is approximately 12-14 years and costing up to $ 1.2 - $ 1.4 billion dollars.
• The use of complementary experimental and informatics techniques increases the chance of success in many stages of the discovery process, from the identification of novel targets and elucidation of their functions to the discovery and development of lead compounds with desired properties.

 

• The researchers had no idea and not understand the “key” or the “lock”. Scientists were used the powerful computers to analyze thousands of interference patterns.
• Next, researchers must find a custom molecule to fit that particular “lock”.
• The molecule must be able to bind to target, be synthesized and manufactured in large quantities, and be metabolized by body at just the right rate.
• High attrition rate of failure – traditional development process has resulted in high attrition rates with failures attributed to poor pharmacokinetics (39%), lack of efficacy (30%), animal toxicity (11%), adverse effects in humans (10%) and various commercial and miscellaneous factors.  Computation tools offer the advantage of delivering new drug candidates more quickly and at a lower cost.
• To discover of drug for rate and unusual disease treatment.
• Accurate and efficient process for developing effective medications and for understanding how drugs actually work. Subsequently, researchers must find a custom molecule to fit that particular “lock”.
• This is because the molecule must be able to:

1. Bind to the target
2. Be synthesized and manufacture in large quantity
3. Be metabolized by the body at just the right rate

• That is why computers are so important in the drug discovery process
• Eventually, the high-powered computers help evaluate the structures and properties of molecules that are most likely to bind to that target and rapidly search database libraries of chemical structures in order to identify the most promising candidates.

QUESTION 2: What roles played by computers in the drug discovery process?

• Generally, in the field of medicine, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered.
• 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.
• It is generally recognized that drug discovery and development are very time and resources consuming processes.

• There is an ever growing effort to apply computational power to the combined chemical and biological space in order to streamline drug discovery, design, development and optimization.
• In biomedical arena, computer-aided is being utilized to expedite and facilitate hit identification, hit-to-lead selection, optimize the absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity profile and avoid safety issues.
• The development of any potential drug begins with years of scientific study to determine the biochemistry behind a disease, for which pharmaceutical intervention is possible.
• The result is the determination of specific receptors (target).
• In the modern era, computer-aided drug design (CADD) has considerably extended its range of applications, spanning almost all stages in the drug discovery pipeline, from target identification to lead discovery, from lead optimization to preclinical or clinical trials.

 

• Drug researchers using structure-based design benefit from a new process of visualizing and modeling promising compounds at the molecular level.
• Facilitate the acquisition and application of knowledge.
• Improving the quality and currency of knowledge. 
•  Improve business processes in all areas of business as well as in medical research.
• Assist in building hypotheses about desirable chemical properties when designing the drugs, to refine and modify drugs candidates.
• Compound databases provide the physico-chemical structural data for computational drug discovery method used in component screening and profiling. 

Briefly, the IT plays an important role in drug discovery process by:

• Computer – analyzing molecular structure
• Databases – organizing data about specific molecules and compounds.
• Software’s – visualizing and modeling molecules
• Designing potential new drugs using computational approaches and chemical/ biological experiments

CONCLUSION

In recent years, computational drug design and more specifically virtual screening, has emerged as a powerful tool in drug discovery. There are numerous approaches to drug design depending on the types of information available about the bioactive ligands and the therapeutic protein target.