Effective and emerging strategies for utilizing structure in drug discovery

Structure-based drug design is emerging as one of the key components in drug discovery, with many approved drugs tracing, at least part of their origins, to the use of structural information from X-ray, NMR, surface plasmon resonance, differential thermal denaturation, fluorescence polarization and other techniques for analysis of protein targets and their ligand-bound complexes. Furthermore, in silico structure-based drug design approach has enabled millions of possible structures for a given protein sequence to be evaluated rapidly helping to fast forward drug discovery as well as reduce drug discovery costs. Structure-based drug design is now arguably an essential contributor to addressing the need to improve research and development productivity faced by the pharmaceutical industry. The purpose of this meeting is to highlight the impact of the intersection of structural biology with chemistry and biology particularly on how the structures of relevant drug targets can serve as a starting point for drug design and development and provide the maximal synergy between target validation, structure determination, and hit-to-lead development. Some thoughts will be proposed with regard to the future of structure-based drug design and where emphasis could be placed to further increase the utilization of this approach on drug discovery