Drug discovery today
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Drug discovery today · Oct 2019
ReviewDrug repurposing: a promising tool to accelerate the drug discovery process.
Traditional drug discovery and development involves several stages for the discovery of a new drug and to obtain marketing approval. It is necessary to discover new strategies for reducing the drug discovery time frame. Today, drug repurposing has gained importance in identifying new therapeutic uses for already-available drugs. ⋯ Numerous strategies to discover new indications for FDA-approved drugs are discussed in this article. Drug repurposing has therefore become a productive approach for drug discovery because it provides a novel way to explore old drugs for new use but encounters several challenges. Some examples of different approaches are reviewed here.
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Chemoinformatics is an established discipline focusing on extracting, processing and extrapolating meaningful data from chemical structures. With the rapid explosion of chemical 'big' data from HTS and combinatorial synthesis, machine learning has become an indispensable tool for drug designers to mine chemical information from large compound databases to design drugs with important biological properties. To process the chemical data, we first reviewed multiple processing layers in the chemoinformatics pipeline followed by the introduction of commonly used machine learning models in drug discovery and QSAR analysis. Here, we present basic principles and recent case studies to demonstrate the utility of machine learning techniques in chemoinformatics analyses; and we discuss limitations and future directions to guide further development in this evolving field.
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Drug discovery today · Aug 2018
ReviewN-acylethanolamine hydrolyzing acid amidase inhibition: tools and potential therapeutic opportunities.
N-acylethanolamines (NAEs) (e.g., N-palmitoylethanolamine, N-arachidonoylethanolamine, N-oleoylethanolamine) are bioactive lipids involved in many physiological processes including pain, inflammation, anxiety, cognition and food intake. Two enzymes are responsible for the hydrolysis of NAEs and therefore regulate their endogenous levels and effects: fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) and N-acylethanolamine-hydrolyzing acid amidase (NAAA). ⋯ An increasing number of studies describe the synthesis and pharmacological characterization of NAAA inhibitors. Recent medicinal chemistry efforts have led to the development of potent and stable inhibitors that enable studying the effects of NAAA inhibition in preclinical disease models, notably in the context of pain and inflammation.
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Drug discovery today · Jul 2018
Review'Bioexit': navigating the policy and regulatory pathways for the biotechnology industry in a post-Brexit landscape.
The withdrawal of the UK from the European Union (EU) is a complicated event. Although implications vary by industry, the biotechnology sector is especially vulnerable to the consequences of Brexit. ⋯ We conclude that all four pathways fail to protect the mutually beneficial UK-EU biotechnology relationship and that alternative pathways need to be explored. Accordingly, we outline a suite of policy mechanisms aimed at ensuring continued EU-UK regulatory synergy, with the central aim of ensuring access to biomedical innovations and ensuring patient safety.
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Drug discovery today · Nov 2017
ReviewFrom machine learning to deep learning: progress in machine intelligence for rational drug discovery.
Machine intelligence, which is normally presented as artificial intelligence, refers to the intelligence exhibited by computers. In the history of rational drug discovery, various machine intelligence approaches have been applied to guide traditional experiments, which are expensive and time-consuming. ⋯ Here, we summarize the history of machine learning and provide insight into recently developed deep learning approaches and their applications in rational drug discovery. We suggest that this evolution of machine intelligence now provides a guide for early-stage drug design and discovery in the current big data era.