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Pharmacophore
300px, An example of a pharmacophore model. A pharmacophore is an abstract description of molecular features that are necessary for molecular recognition of a ligand by a biological macromolecule. IUPAC defines a pharmacophore to be "an ensemble of steric and electronic features that is necessary to ensure the optimal supramolecular interactions with a specific biological target and to trigger (or block) its biological response". A pharmacophore model explains how structurally diverse ligands can bind to a common receptor site. Furthermore, pharmacophore models can be used to identify through de novo design or virtual screening novel ligands that will bind to the same receptor. Features Typical pharmacophore features include hydrophobic centroids, aromatic rings, hydrogen bond acceptors or donors, cations, and anions. These pharmacophoric points may be located on the ligand itself or may be projected points presumed to be located in the receptor. The features need to match ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual Screening
Virtual screening (VS) is a computational technique used in drug discovery to search libraries of small molecules in order to identify those structures which are most likely to bind to a drug target, typically a protein receptor or enzyme. Virtual screening has been defined as "automatically evaluating very large libraries of compounds" using computer programs. As this definition suggests, VS has largely been a numbers game focusing on how the enormous chemical space of over 1060 conceivable compounds can be filtered to a manageable number that can be synthesized, purchased, and tested. Although searching the entire chemical universe may be a theoretically interesting problem, more practical VS scenarios focus on designing and optimizing targeted combinatorial libraries and enriching libraries of available compounds from in-house compound repositories or vendor offerings. As the accuracy of the method has increased, virtual screening has become an integral part of the drug disco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ligand (biochemistry)
In biochemistry and pharmacology, a ligand is a substance that forms a complex with a biomolecule to serve a biological purpose. The etymology stems from ''ligare'', which means 'to bind'. In protein-ligand binding, the ligand is usually a molecule which produces a signal by binding to a site on a target protein. The binding typically results in a change of conformational isomerism (conformation) of the target protein. In DNA-ligand binding studies, the ligand can be a small molecule, ion, or protein which binds to the DNA double helix. The relationship between ligand and binding partner is a function of charge, hydrophobicity, and molecular structure. Binding occurs by intermolecular forces, such as ionic bonds, hydrogen bonds and Van der Waals forces. The association or docking is actually reversible through dissociation. Measurably irreversible covalent bonding between a ligand and target molecule is atypical in biological systems. In contrast to the definition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Molecule Mining
This page describes mining for molecules. Since molecules may be represented by molecular graphs this is strongly related to graph mining and structured data mining. The main problem is how to represent molecules while discriminating the data instances. One way to do this is chemical similarity metrics, which has a long tradition in the field of cheminformatics. Typical approaches to calculate chemical similarities use chemical fingerprints, but this loses the underlying information about the molecule topology. Mining the molecular graphs directly avoids this problem. So does the inverse QSAR problem which is preferable for vectorial mappings. Coding(Moleculei,Moleculej\neqi) Kernel methods * Marginalized graph kernelH. Kashima, K. Tsuda, A. Inokuchi, Marginalized Kernels Between Labeled Graphs, The 20th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2003), 2003. PDF * Optimal assignment kernelH. Fröhlich, J. K. Wegner, A. Zell, ''Optimal Assignment Kernels For Attribu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drug Design
Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is most commonly an organic small molecule that activates or inhibits the function of a biomolecule such as a protein, which in turn results in a therapeutic benefit to the patient. In the most basic sense, drug design involves the design of molecules that are complementary in shape and charge to the biomolecular target with 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 sometimes referred to as computer-aided drug design. Finally, drug design that relies on the knowledge of the three-dimensional structure of the biomolecular target is known as structure-based drug design. In addition to small molecules, biopharmaceuticals including peptides and especially therapeutic antibodies ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biological Activity
In pharmacology, biological activity or pharmacological activity describes the beneficial or adverse effects of a drug on living matter. When a drug is a complex chemical mixture, this activity is exerted by the substance's active ingredient or pharmacophore but can be modified by the other constituents. Among the various properties of chemical compounds, pharmacological/biological activity plays a crucial role since it suggests uses of the compounds in the medical applications. However, chemical compounds may show some adverse and toxic effects which may prevent their use in medical practice. Activity is generally dosage-dependent. Further, it is common to have effects ranging from beneficial to adverse for one substance when going from low to high doses. Activity depends critically on fulfillment of the ADME criteria. To be an effective drug, a compound not only must be active against a target, but also possess the appropriate ADME (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drug Discovery
In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery, as with penicillin. More recently, chemical libraries of synthetic small molecules, natural products or extracts were screened in intact cells or whole organisms to identify substances that had a desirable therapeutic effect in a process known as classical pharmacology. After sequencing of the human genome allowed rapid cloning and synthesis of large quantities of purified proteins, it has become common practice to use high throughput screening of large compounds libraries against isolated biological targets which are hypothesized to be disease-modifying in a process known as reverse pharmacology. Hits from these screens are then tested in cells and then in animals for efficacy. Modern drug discovery inv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medicinal Chemistry
Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacy involved with designing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes the study of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR). Medicinal chemistry is a highly interdisciplinary science combining organic chemistry with biochemistry, computational chemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology, statistics, and physical chemistry. Compounds used as medicines are most often organic compounds, which are often divided into the broad classes of small organic molecules (e.g., atorvastatin, fluticasone, clopidogrel) and "biologics" (infliximab, erythropoietin, insulin glargine), the latter of which are most often medicinal preparations of proteins (natural and recombinant anti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bioisostere
In medicinal chemistry, bioisosteres are chemical substituents or groups with similar physical or chemical properties which produce broadly similar biological properties to another chemical compound. In drug design, the purpose of exchanging one bioisostere for another is to enhance the desired biological or physical properties of a compound without making significant changes in chemical structure. The main use of this term and its techniques are related to pharmaceutical sciences. Bioisosterism is used to reduce toxicity, change bioavailability, or modify the activity of the lead compound, and may alter the metabolism of the lead. Examples Classical bioisosteres Classical bioisosterism was originally formulated by James Moir and refined by Irving Langmuir as a response to the observation that different atoms with the same valence electron structure had similar biological properties. For example, the replacement of a hydrogen atom with a fluorine atom at a site of metabolism ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cheminformatics
Cheminformatics (also known as chemoinformatics) refers to use of physical chemistry theory with computer and information science techniques—so called "''in silico''" techniques—in application to a range of descriptive and prescriptive problems in the field of chemistry, including in its applications to biology and related molecular fields. Such ''in silico'' techniques are used, for example, by pharmaceutical companies and in academic settings to aid and inform the process of drug discovery, for instance in the design of well-defined combinatorial libraries of synthetic compounds, or to assist in structure-based drug design. The methods can also be used in chemical and allied industries, and such fields as environmental science and pharmacology, where chemical processes are involved or studied. History Cheminformatics has been an active field in various guises since the 1970s and earlier, with activity in academic departments and commercial pharmaceutical research and deve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biological Target
A biological target is anything within a living organism to which some other entity (like an endogenous ligand or a drug) is directed and/or binds, resulting in a change in its behavior or function. Examples of common classes of biological targets are proteins and nucleic acids. The definition is context-dependent, and can refer to the biological target of a pharmacologically active drug compound, the receptor target of a hormone (like insulin), or some other target of an external stimulus. Biological targets are most commonly proteins such as enzymes, ion channels, and receptors. Mechanism The external stimulus (''i.e.'', the drug or ligand) physically binds to ("hits") the biological target. The interaction between the substance and the target may be: * noncovalent – A relatively weak interaction between the stimulus and the target where no chemical bond is formed between the two interacting partners and hence the interaction is completely reversible. * reversible covalen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich (; 14 March 1854 – 20 August 1915) was a Nobel Prize-winning German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy. Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria. The methods he developed for staining tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the ability to diagnose numerous blood diseases. His laboratory discovered arsphenamine (Salvarsan), the first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis, thereby initiating and also naming the concept of chemotherapy. Ehrlich popularized the concept of a magic bullet. He also made a decisive contribution to the development of an antiserum to combat diphtheria and conceived a method for standardizing therapeutic serums. In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunology. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lemont Kier
Lemont Kier (born September 13, 1930) is an American chemist and researcher in the field of drug design and medicinal chemistry. He is the recipient of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists 2008 Research Achievement Award in Drug Development and Discovery. He obtained his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1958 and is currently a Professor Emeritus of Medicinal Chemistry and Nurse Anesthesia at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Kier participated in the founding of the Center for the Study of Biological Complexity at Virginia Commonwealth University. Work Kier built one of the first models in which molecular orbital theory In chemistry, molecular orbital theory (MO theory or MOT) is a method for describing the electronic structure of molecules using quantum mechanics. It was proposed early in the 20th century. In molecular orbital theory, electrons in a molecul ... was applied successfully to drug design and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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