The necessity of extraction of ligand binding data from literature

Abstract

After identification and validation of targets in a drug development process, some independent lead compounds should be selected and optimized for their activities. Then, safety assessments and clinical trials decide whether the drug is proper to enter the market. Different stages of this process (and especially the identification of lead compounds) are extremely expensive and time-consuming. Rational drug development methods try to reduce the costs by optimizing the pace of drug discovery and reducing the number of products abandoned during development. For decades, many investigators have studied the ligand-protein interactions, but very few structured databases are devoted to such information. Herein, development of such databases is proposed, since it is obvious that our prior knowledge about the chemico-biological interactions can help us choosing appropriate lead compounds without further experimental and computational investigations, which are usually based on searching in gigantic combinatorial databases of chemical compounds.