Rational drug design - identifying and characterising a target.

Abstract

Structure-based drug design is now a common method used by the pharmaceutical industry to identify a lead compound and take it forward for further development. This article describes the methods used to identify and characterise a target for structured drug design and illustrates how pharmacists can play an important role in this process, under the headings: identifying a target; proteomics; the poptein databank; DNA; enzyme inhibitors; receptor agonists and antagonists; rational drug design.