Monday, March 28, 2011

The Future of Drug Discovery


 The new technologies promise to fill drug development pipelines with small-molecule candidates unfulfilled, so the pharmaceutical industry is currently undergoing rapid changes. They are moving aggressively into large molecule (biologics) drug development.

"Drug space” that is not part of the current drug development includes non-Lipinski NCEs, nanomedicines, nucleic acid-based drugs, etc. will include in the future. One of the major challenges for a medicinal chemist is to find small molecule inhibitors for protein-protein interactions.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Toxicophores Simplified

Toxicophore is a portion of a chemical structure (molecular functionalities) responsible for the toxic properties of a pharmacologically activity compound. Medicinal chemists study toxicophores to predict and replace the potential reactive moieties in the early drug development process to avoid the drug candidate's later-stage failure. A simplified version of the toxicophores is attached here.