In silico Drug Design

The research-based pharmaceutical industry has faced growing challenges in recent years as a result of increased economic and regulatory pressures. Rising health care costs, increasing-price pressure from managed care organizations, international price controls, rapid appearance of generic products (or competition within a therapeutic class) in the market, and more stringent regulatory policies have compelled the research-based pharmaceutical companies to refine and accelerate their drug discovery-development processes. Drug discovery process basically is a patient oriented science, where researchers strive to improve the existing drugs or invent a totally new chemical entity, which should be ideally more potent than any existing drug of a similar category. The development of new drugs with potential therapeutic applications is one of the most complex and difficult process. Millions of capital and man-hours are devoted to the discovery of new therapeutic agents. Intervention of computers at some plausible steps is imperative to bring down the cost and time required in the drug discovery process.