Drug discovery is one of the most complicated processes and establishment of a single drug
may require multidisciplinary attempts to design efficient and commercially viable drugs. The main
purpose of drug design is to identify a chemical compound or inhibitor that can bind to an active site
of a specific cavity on a target protein. The traditional drug design methods involved various experimental
based approaches including random screening of chemicals found in nature or can be synthesized
directly in chemical laboratories. Except for the long cycle design and time, high cost is also the
major issue of concern. Modernized computer-based algorithm including structure-based drug design
has accelerated the drug design and discovery process adequately. Surprisingly from the past decade remarkable progress
has been made concerned with all area of drug design and discovery. CADD (Computer Aided Drug Designing) based
tools shorten the conventional cycle size and also generate chemically more stable and worthy compounds and hence reduce
the drug discovery cost. This special edition of editorial comprises the combination of seven research and review articles
set emphasis especially on the computational approaches along with the experimental approaches using a chemical
synthesizing for the binding affinity in chemical biology and discovery as a salient used in de-novo drug designing. This
set of articles exfoliates the role that systems biology and the evaluation of ligand affinity in drug design and discovery for
the future.
Small molecules with big roles in microRNA chemical biology and microRNA-targeted therapeutics
