oa Editorial [Hot topic: Pharmacophore Modeling in Drug Design: Recent Advances (Guest Editor: Osman F. Guner)]

Almost all of today's recently released drugs are designed using Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) techniques. Among various methods, Structure-Based Design (SBD) and Pharmacophore Modeling are the two most successful methodologies in designing new drug candidates. Whereas SBD requires the receptor structure to be known, there is no such requirement for pharmacophore modeling. This makes pharmacophore modeling a universal tool for CADD. Availability of receptor structure, however, makes the pharmacophore tools even more powerful as demonstrated by the four papers in this issue. The aim of this special issue is to highlight recent developments in this area. The papers focus on success stories, recent developments in pharmacophore-based design, and new approaches and algorithms. The Special Issue starts with an application article on an excellent study by Elizabeth Sobhia and Dara Ajay that utilizes various computational techniques with a receptor-based pharmacophore approach to discover potential inhibitors of PTP-LAR. Methodologically, the authors have employed existing commercial software tools to create receptor-based pharmacophore from an apoenzyme when no bound ligand is present in the crystal structure, which was then used to identify potential ligands that were further validated through docking studies and analyses. From there, we then move to observing how some of these existing tools have been enhanced within the Discovery Studio environment. Jon Sutter and co-worker's paper not only discusses the recent enhancement made to their popular pharmacophore modeling system based on Catalyst, it also describes some of the new tools supporting receptor-based pharmacophores. Weifan Zheng and co-workers describe a new approach in combining the active-site shape and pharmacophore tools to develop more selective pharmacophore models. This approach is an enhancement to the existing commercial tools that involve combined shape-pharmacophore tools......