The XXI century has opened new probabilities in the sphere of medication discovery and development but it is still very expensive procedure. You may find that a price of drug discoveries and development takes form 897 million of US dollars to 1.9 billion of US dollars. The typical development time is from ten to fifteen years. Research and Development of a new medication involves the identification of a target (e.g. protein) and the discovery of a suitable drug candidates that can block or promote the target. The following phase of the process is medical experiment that takes a great amount of time and needs government permissions for its holding. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues endorsements to the drugs that would be released in the US. Drug discovery process needs a great amount of expenses and efforts to do all the things in the correct way.



The best way of identification successive medical candidate is examination of the interaction of target protein with different compounds that are selected by chemists from special compound libraries where these compounds are situated. Often chemists use high-throughput screening (HTS) for this kind of testing. Compound lists are commercially available in sizes of up to a few millions of compounds. Compounds that become the most active ones are called hits. Such compounds wonderfully interreact with the target. Later some hits are taken to lead compounds. In future they will be improved and modified to get greater results from their interaction and less side-effects.

Chemists have 2 means of drug design nowadays. The next are methods for finding a medication candidates, along with their pros and cons:

1. Virtual screening (VS) founded on the computationally inferred or simulated genuine screening;

The main benefits of this mode compared to laboratory tests are:

- low prices, no compounds have to be purchased externally or synthesized by a scientist;

- scientists can research different compounds that are yet in project;

- High-throughput screening is rather expensive and VS gives a possibility to choose a number of helpful compounds for further HTS experiments;

- huge amount of chemicals to look from.

There are accessible a great number of different molecules in VS experiments in comparison with the number that gives high-throughput screening method. But we are to claim about the shortage of VS. That is inability to see real interaction of compounds.

2. The real screening, such as high-throughput screening (HTS), may experimentally test the activity of hundreds of thousands of compounds against the target a day. So scientists get real outcome during this method of medication discovery. But it requires great funds.

Computational methods can be used to predict or simulate how a specific compound interacts with a given protein target. They may be used to help build hypotheses about required chemical features when designing the drug and, moreover, they can be utilized to improve and modify drug candidates. Molecular Docking, Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR) and Pharmacopoeia Mapping are the means that are utilized nowadays in modern drug discovery procedures. If you need drug discovery service you can get it on this page.