Structural Biology in Drug Discovery

Structure-based drug discovery is now a full part of the pharmaceutical industry, and many companies use both high-throughput screening and fragment screening to find starting points for their small-molecule R&D programs.

Knowledge of the 3D structures of proteins has long been acknowledged as having the potential to expedite drug discovery, but recent advancements in genome sequencing, robotics, and bioinformatics have drastically altered the opportunities. Through genomic analyses and X-ray or NMR spectroscopy, numerous new protein targets have been found and examined. Structural biology has been essential in guiding not only lead optimization and target identification, where it has well-established responsibilities, but also lead discovery, now that high-throughput methods of structure determination may provide effective screening approaches.