Rational drug design

From DrugPedia: A Wikipedia for Drug discovery

Rational drug design, is an inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of the biological target.The drug is most commonly an organic small molecule which activates or inhibits the function of a biomolecule such as a protein which in turn results in benefit of the patient.

In the most basic sense, drug design involves design of small molecules that are complementary in shape and charge to the biomolecular target to which they interact and therefore will bind to it. Drug design frequently but not necessarily relies on computer modeling techniques.This type of modeling is often referred to as computer-aided drug design. Rational drug design is the process that initially required a long duration of constant work but with the involvement of the computers and various softwares.

The whole process consists of several steps: (a)Cloning,expression and purification of the protein of interest. (b)Optimization of the ligand for protein. (c)Creation of small library on the basis of SAR(Structure Activity Relationship)

The three processes constitute the first cycle,it is often necessary to undergo several iterations of the above cycle of structure determination,design,synthesis and testing before a drug candidate.