A Quick Overview of Recent Approaches to the Synthesis and Design of New Drugs

Drug discovery studies from past years to the present showsthat the type of drug discovery process is directly correlatedwith the pharmaceutical industry, drug prices, and annualdrug sales. Indeed, research has displayed that the cost ofpharmaceutical studies at human levels and animal stagesshould be replaced with pre-synthetic drug research.The development of new methods such as genomics,proteomics, bioinformatics, high-throughput screening,combinatorial chemistry, microarray technology, andADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion,and toxicity) has directed to a better understanding of themechanisms of drug action and targets, thereby leading tothe introduction of more reliable drug candidates (۱).In recent years, the link between chemistry and biologicalfindings has made the process of drug discovery based onrational principles to predict its action. An example ofthe drug discovery process using biological informationincluding gene and protein expression, modulation andregulation, and cell signaling is related to HIV proteaseinhibitors. Medicinal chemists have employed cellularstudies, molecular modeling, and biological informationto design appropriate enzyme inhibitors (۲). Certainly,the design of new drug molecules is not well definedand depends on a variety of factors. Investigating themolecular structure of drugs and their activities, as wellas investigating the crystallographic studies on complexor non-biological complex drugs with drug molecules,has greatly contributed to the advancement of the drugdiscovery process. Given the trend of drug discovery inrecent years, highly effective drugs have been designed andmarketed to control hypertension, osteoporosis, migraineheadache, asthma, and so on. However, there are manyresearch opportunities for designing new molecules andmore advanced studies such as drug delivery and ADMETtopics.