What’s a Drug Designer To Do?
The goal of computer aided drug design (CADD) has always been to help identify better drugs faster. Achieving this goal has always been difficult, and it has become more so in the last several years. Increasingly complex constraints have been imposed on drug candidates as the focus of pharmaceutical research efforts have shifted away from cures and toward very long term treatments for chronic diseases. Such treatments are necessarily more prone to side effects and long term toxicity.
Techniques based on identifying some kind of structure activity relationship (SAR) have always been the mainstay of CADD, but such techniques are by their very nature ill-suited for identifying the sort of problematic idiosyncrasies involved in clinical failures attributable to lack of efficacy and toxicity. In light of these considerations, finding ways to combine SARs into robust meta-analyses are likely to become more important in the years ahead.
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