Pharmacology

Drug discovery is a process aiming at identifying compound useful in curing certain disease by interacting with certain biological target molecule. Since it may take years to develop a new drug that can be introduced into the market, the process of drug discovery is a tedious, time consuming one. This led to the introduction of computer aided drug design (CADD) technologies in the field of drug discovery, as CADD enables the pharmaceutical researcher to reduce the number of compounds to be synthesized and tested and reduce up to 50% in the cost of drug design as well; also it increases the probability of design of compounds with acceptable biological activity. Advances in computational techniques and hardware solutions have enabled in silico methods to speed up lead optimization and identification.