Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2015

Malaria, the most virulent parasitic disease, has become a devastating health problem in tropical and subtropical regions, especially in Africa, due to favorable temperature and rainfall conditions for the development of the causative vector. Due to the spread of multidrug resistance to the marketed antimalarial drugs including the “magic bullet” artemisinin, discovery and development of new antimalarial drugs is one of the Read More

Antimalarial drug discovery process is progressively carried out by a combination of innovation and knowledge based methods that include computational and experimental approaches to achieve potent leads. Among the various computational approaches, chemoinformatics plays a critical role in the discovery of new leads or drug candidates. Chemoinformatics provides researchers tools to derive information on sub Read More

Among the various parasitic diseases, malaria is the deadliest one. Due to the emergence of high drug resistance to the existing drug candidates there is a global need for development of new drug candidates which will be effective against resistant strains of malaria parasite. In silico molecular modeling approaches have been playing an important role in the discovery of novel lead molecules having antimalarial activit Read More

3D-QSAR has become a very important tool in the field of Drug Discovery, especially in important areas like malarial research. The 3D-QSAR is principally a ligand-based drug design but the bioactive conformation of the ligand can also be taken into account in constructing a 3D-QSAR model. The induction of receptor-based 3D-QSAR has been proven to give more robust statistical models. In this review, we have discus Read More

The emerging cases of artemisinin and endoperoxide drug resistance are becoming a challenge to antimalarial drug discovery and therapy. The exact mode of action of this class of antimalarials is still unknown which presents a bottleneck for the understanding of drug resistance as well as designing new lead molecules of this class. To address this issue, the molecular docking and scoring studies of a homogeneous and struc Read More

A series of quinolon-4(1H)-imines have been recently discovered as antimalarials, targeting both the exoerythrocytic and erythrocytic stages of the parasite’s development stages, which correspond to the phase of clinical symptoms. Endowed with chemical and metabolic stability, the quinolon-4(1H)- imines are thus presented as promissory dual-stage antimalarials. Three versions of multivariate image analysis applied to quanti Read More

P. falciparum dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (PfDHODH) of the pyrimidine biosynthetic pathway offers a promising target for the development of antimalarial drugs in the scenario of widespread P. falciparum resistance. In this background, we have made an effort to decipher the structural requirements for the inhibition of PfDHODH using regression-based 2DQSAR, 3D-pharmacophore modeling and energy-based pharmaco Read More

Falcipain-3 (FP-3) is a cysteine protease of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum which is a promising and attractive target enzyme for antiparasitic chemotherapy. In this study, a support vector machine (SVM) model based on fingerprint-based descriptors was developed on a dataset of 239 FP-3 inhibitors to identify the most active antimalarial compounds among the active compounds provided from similarity Read More