Current Protein and Peptide Science - Volume 8, Issue 4, 2007

Structure based drug design is a phrase heard nowadays quite frequently among people in the pharmaceutical industry as well as in academic circles. The techniques used in structure determination, both X-ray crystallography and NMR methods, saw rapid advancements causing deposition of huge number of structures in the Protein Databank (PDB). Numerous validation methods and deposition of high resolution structures Read More

This review gives an introduction into ligand - receptor docking and illustrates the basic underlying concepts. An overview of different approaches and algorithms is provided. Although the application of docking and scoring has led to some remarkable successes, there are still some major challenges ahead, which are outlined here as well. Approaches to address some of these challenges and the latest developments in the Read More

Virtual screening emerged as an important tool in our quest to access novel drug like compounds. There are a wide range of comparable and contrasting methodological protocols available in screening databases for the lead compounds. The number of methods and software packages which employ the target and ligand based virtual screening are increasing at a rapid pace. However, the general understanding on the a Read More

Glycogen Synthase Kinase-3 (GSK-3) is a serine/threonine kinase with varied number of actions in cellular signalling systems making it an emerging target for diseases such as diabetes mellitus, cancer, chronic inflammation, bipolar affective disorders and Alzheimer's disease. Various efforts have produced many potent small molecule inhibitors of GSK-3, which are being tested for modulation of glycogen metabolism, gene tra Read More

Tuberculosis has become one of the deadliest global emergencies due to the widespread existence of multiple drug resistance strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the increase of immuno-compromised populations in large parts of the world. Although the complete genome of M. tuberculosis became available in 1998, opening unprecedented opportunities for target-specific drug development, the progress sinc Read More

Structure based drug designing is now a popular technique used for increasing the speed of drug designing process. This was made possible by the availability of many protein structures which helped in developing tools to understand the structure function relationships, automated docking and virtual screening. Knowledge of structure based functional properties of a drug target is very essential for a successful in silico designing Read More

In today's research environment, a wealth of experimental/theoretical structural data is available and the number of therapeutically relevant macromolecular structures is growing rapidly. This, coupled with the huge number of small non-peptide potential drug candidates easily available (over 7 million compounds), highlight the need of using computeraided techniques for the efficient identification and optimization of nov Read More

The next generation of vaccines are being rationally designed according to rules that govern the way in which antigen is recognised by and stimulates the immune system. Amongst the first cells that encounter potentially dangerous agents such as viruses and bacteria are cells of the innate immune system, such as dendritic cells, that are widely distributed throughout the body including the skin. These cells patrol mos Read More