Rational drug design - identifying and characterising a target

摘要

Many drugs available today were discovered by chance. Such serendipitous drug discovery has led to many drugs used commonly in pharmacy, such as glyceryl trinitrate and warfarin. Although serendipity has had a role to play in the pharmaceutical industry over the years, current drug discovery is an extraordinarily complicated, expensive and time-consuming process, with strategies involving screening natural products, mimicking biological substrates (and metabolites), and the use of structure-based drug design.