Development of a Database System for Drug Discovery by Employing Grid Technology

Now that the human genome project has been completed and the human genes have been identified, genome-based drug discovery is starting to play a major role. It involves the process of target and lead identifications; identifying proteins (or drug targets) causing the disease, and identi-fying the lead compounds that would counteract them. We have developed a system for accelerating drug discovery, especially focusing on the lead identification. The system is based on Globus Toolkit3/OGSA-DAI and is accessible through the OGSA Grid Data Service. In this system, we have designed meta-databases for integrating information on disease, proteins (drug targets) and ligands (lead com-pounds). Using this system, one could easily screen a large library of compounds for ligands of a given protein, just by specifying the protein sequence. The effectiveness of our system is demonstrated by measuring the performance of the lead identification of several target proteins, such as nu-clear receptors. 1