Biology and Medicine

Abstract

Indispensable chemical genomic approaches in novel systemic targeted drug discovery

A Kanikkai Raja, A Babu Vimalanathan, S Vinoth Raj, S Suresh Kumar, G Swamynathan, Manoj G Tyagi

Chemogenomics is a new emerging area in the field of drug discovery and development. It describes the development of target specific chemical ligands and the use of such specific chemical ligands to globally study the gene level and protein level functions. The human genome contains around 100,000 genes and 30,000 proteins which are encoded by it. Primarily the novel, systemic, very small molecular sized, cell permeable and target specific chemical ligands are particularly useful in systematic genomic approaches to study the normal and abnormal biological functions. The complete genomic sequence information with structural and comparative genomics when combined with all the features in synthetic chemistry, ligand screening and identification provides target or functions specific chemical ligands and drugs. Currently, the in-silico approaches are in vogue in novel target prediction and systemic drug discovery. It is prediction of biological targets of small molecules via data mining in target annotated chemical databases. This review will focus on the chemogenomics, its approaches for rational drug design and the recent in-silico approaches in novel target prediction.