CONTRIBUTIONS OF SOFTWARES IN DRUG DESIGN: A REVIEW

*Nikitha K.

ABSTRACT

Drug discovery encompass of drug designing and drug development. It is an expansive, extravagant strive with typical development time of 10-15 years, where least number of drugs that pass the clinical trials reach the market. Software based drug discovery have major role in the development of bioactive compounds and has potential role to design novel proteins or drugs in biotechnology or pharmaceutical field. These software‟s are used to analyse molecular modelling of gene, gene expression, gene sequence analysis and also for 3D structure of proteins and has crucial role in the diagnosis of lung cancer, brain cancer, breast cancer and Alzheimer disease. These methods are faster, and accurately provide valuable insights of experimental findings, mechanisms of action and appropriate implementation could lead to a reduction in cost of drug designing and development. These software‟s are exhibiting exigent role in the identification of a target and the discovery of some suitable drug molecule that can activate or inactivate the target. Computer aided drug design CADD or Computer assisted Molecular-designing CAMD are the computer-assisted techniques to design, discover and augment biologically active compounds. The software‟s such as Insight II, Discovery Studio, Materials Studio, Accord, Prime and Jaguar are designed for structure- based drug designing and the software‟s such as Glide, Macro Model, Auto dock and Argus lab are designed for ligand-based drug designing. These software also has prominent role in molecular dynamics, which are considered to be a powerful tool for investigation of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics properties of drug and structural activity relationship between ligand and its target. Such software‟s are indeed useful to assist the costly, complex and highly challenging field of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic that are benefitting the drug development process.

Keywords: Drug design, Drug development, CAAD, Software.