Discovering New Drugs In Favor of Bioinformatics and Pharmacogenetics

Discovering or designing a new drug is a very complicated, time-consuming, and expensive process. starts with the identification of a potential target at which the drug can act. The target can be an enzyme in a vital pathway, a receptor, a transporter, a protein in signal transduction, or any protein produced in a pathological condition. To the clinical trial where the efficacy and safety of the drug being tested before it goes public to the market. all these things can be made easier with the help of bioinformatics and pharmacogenetics.

Bioinformatics Role

Bioinformatics is the application of tools of computation and analysis to the capture and interpretation of biological data. It is essential for the management of data in modern biology and medicine. With the advances in technology, nowadays many pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in approaches that show the potential to accelerate any phase of the drug development process. Bioinformatics can be one of the solutions to the increasing pressure to generate more and more drugs in a short period of time with low risk.

Mining and warehousing of the human genome sequence using bioinformatics have helped to define and classify the nucleotide compositions of those genes, which are responsible for the coding of target proteins, in addition to identifying new targets that offer more potential for new drugs (Chen and Chen 2008; Katara et al. 2011). Bioinformatics allows the identification and analysis of more and more biological drug targets; thus expected to greatly increase the breadth of potential drugs in the pipelines of pharmaceutical companies (Whittaker 2003; Ortega et al. 2012).

Pharmacogenomics Role

Pharmacogenomics refers to the effects of genetic polymorphism and genomic variants on drug response, its knowledge can help in the selection of the optimal drug, dose, and treatment process and avoid adverse drug reactions (Amstutz and Carleton 2011). It’s the new darling trend in medical sciences, which influences the success of drug development and therapeutics. With the help of Pharmacogenetics probability of success from a new drug compound, viz safety and efficacy have become more predictable.

The pharmacogenomics approach enables pharmaceutical companies to design drugs that satisfied the requirements of particular genetic sub-groups of the general population (Nelson et al. 2009). These personalized medicines based on patient genetic profile reduce the speculation in drug prescriptions and thus increase the confidence of both physician and patient, and modify the predominating approaches to drug discovery and development, diagnostics, therapies, and disease prevention strategies.

Although bioinformatics and pharmacogenetics have and show potential in the development of new types of drugs, there are still a number of obstacles that remain. It is hoped that the application of these two sciences will be maximized in the near future