This volume offers a broad and interdisciplinary view of modern approaches to drug discovery as used by pharmaceutical companies and research institutes. It comprehensively covers proteomics, bioinformatics, screening techniques such as high-throughput-, natural compounds-, and NMR-based-screenings, combinatorial chemistry, compound library design, ligand- and structure-based drug design and pharmacokinetic approaches. Each of the thirteen chapters reviews the theory, background and application of a key technology in drug discovery and is complemented by an extensive list of references to the original literature.

This concise source of information will be useful to workers in the pharmaceutical industry as well as researchers and students in the fields of medicinal, pharmaceutical and computational chemistry, bioinformatics, biochemistry, molecular biology and pharmacology.

Inhalt
1 Modern methods of drug discovery: An introduction.- 2 Proteomics.- 3 Bioinformatics.- 4 High-throughput screening technologies.- 5 Natural products for lead identification: Nature is a valuable resource for providing tools.- 6 Combinatorial chemistry: Mixture-based combinatorial libraries of acyclic and heterocyclic compounds from amino acids and short peptides.- 7 Computational approaches towards the quantification of molecular diversity and design of compound libraries.- 8 The role of protein 3D-structures in the drug discovery process.- 9 NMR-based screening methods for lead discovery.- 10 Structure-based design of combinatorial libraries.- 11 3D QSAR in modern drug design.- 12 Physicochemical concepts in drug design.- 13 Computer-aided prediction of drug toxicity and metabolism.