Abstract

Drug discovery process is a critical issue in the pharmaceutical industry since it is a very cost-effective and time consuming process to produce new drug potentials and enlarge the scope of diseases incurred. Drug target identification, being the first phase in drug discovery is becoming an overly time consuming process. In many cases, such produces inefficient results due to failure of conventional approaches like in vivo and in vitro to investigate large scale data. Sophisticated in silico approaches has given a tremendous opportunity to pharmaceutical companies to identify new potential drug targets which in turn affect the success and time of performing clinical trials for discovering new drug targets. The main goal of this work is to review in silico methods for drug discovery process with emphasis on identifying drug targets, where there are genes or proteins associated with specific diseases. This review provides a succinct overview of several recent approaches that employ bioinformatics for the systematic characterization of the targets of bioactive compounds.

Key words: In silico, infectious vector, drug, pharmaceutical industry.