It is being realized that most of the pathogens responsible for causing
diseases in human and other animals have become resistant to general antibiotics.
Therefore, there is more emphasis on the development of specific drugs in present day
researches. Bioinformatics has played an important role in this field and due to which
cost of drug development is curtailed even upto 60 to 70%. During work on specific
drug development, important part is determination of drug target(s). A drug target is a
biological molecule whose activity is altered by drug that results in desirable
therapeutic effect. Drug targets are mainly enzymes, receptors, ion channels or nucleic
acids. Identification of drug targets is very complex process during early drug
discovery. After genome sequencing, bioinformatics design essential tools are used for
in silico drug target identification. These include tools for genome/ proteome analysis,
similarity searching, EST identification, structure prediction, functional prediction,
localization prediction, pattern matching, pathway mapping, network analysis, proteinprotein
interaction and many more. Using combination of these tools, different
approaches are designed to find the drug targets. In this chapter, we have tried to
describe some of these approaches with the tools that are used for identification of drug
targets. In addition, we also discussed the results obtained in many cases by applying
these approaches.
Today, drug discovery is relying on computational methods to accelerate the
identification of potential drug targets. This acceleration leads to fast drug discovery
process. These computational methods are used based on the available data and
resources of the pathogen and disease. However combinations of approaches are also
used to fully characterize the drug target. Once a drug target is identified, it is validated
by several wet lab techniques.
Keywords: Drug targets, Identification, In silico, Network, Protein, Subtractive
genomics, Validation.
