Drug Design: An Overview

Drug discovery is the process where new medicines are identified with respective to various fields like chemistry, pharmacology and biology. With the involvement of some newer techniques the practice of the drug discovery process has been revolutionized. Target based drug design is more advantageous, effective and time consuming. With the use of High Throughput Screening (HTS) technique a large number of compounds screened for their biological activity with the discovered target, which are synthesized by combinatorial chemistry, they are called hits. Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSAR) constitutes immense importance in discovering new drug candidate called analogues which shows high affinity with the target. Various advanced techniques and Modern research disciplines such as metabolomics, chemogenomics, genomics, proteomics, and others improve the quality of the drug discovery process. The main objective of this article is to highlight the steps and trends followed in drug discovery process and methodology applied in drug designing.