Structure-Based Drug Design 2012

Structure-based drug design took nearly two decades of multiple, parallel technological improvements to arrive at its current mainstream position in medicinal chemistry. Developments in computer graphics, high-power radiation sources, computational processing power, refinement protocols, virtual screening and crystallography were all necessary to create the environment for rapid, iterative structure-based drug discovery. Given the crisis facing the pharmaceutical industry in the translation of early stage drug discovery results, a different set of tools, concerned with algorithms and methods for predicting the biological profiles, will need to be refined.