Computer-aided drug discovery/design methods have played a major role in the development of therapeutically important small molecules for over three decades. These methods are broadly classified as either structure-based or ligand-based methods. Structure-based methods are in principle analogous to high-throughput screening in that both target and ligand structure information is imperative. Str...

The present study utilizes for the first time the structural information of aromatase, an important pharmacological target in anti-breast cancer therapy, to extract the pharmacophoric features important for interactions between the enzyme and its substrate, androstenedione. A ligand-based pharmacophore model developed from the most comprehensive list of nonsteroidal aromatase inhibitors (AIs) i...

CYP51 fulfills an essential requirement for all cells, by catalyzing three sequential mono-oxidations within the cholesterol biosynthesis cascade. Inhibition of fungal CYP51 is used as a therapy for treating fungal infections, whereas inhibition of human CYP51 has been considered as a pharmacological approach to treat dyslipidemia and some forms of cancer. To predict the interaction of inhibito...

Pharmacophore modeling incorporates geometric and chemical features of known inhibitors and/or targeted binding sites to rationally identify and design new drug leads. In this study, we have encoded a three-dimensional pharmacophore matching similarity (FMS) scoring function into the structure-based design program DOCK. Validation and characterization of the method are presented through pose re...

We developed a pharmacophore-based evolutionary approach for virtual screening. This tool, termed the Generic Evolutionary Method for molecular DOCKing (GEMDOCK), combines an evolutionary approach with a new pharmacophore-based scoring function. The former integrates discrete and continuous global search strategies with local search strategies to expedite convergence. The latter, integrating an...

Three dimensional pharmacophore models can be considered as an ensemble of steric and electronic features in space, which are necessary to ensure intermolecular interaction with a specific target in order to trigger or to block biological activity [1]. By identifying these features, a 3D pharmacophore model can be built in order to screen multi-conformatorial databases with the aim to detect co...

In the last years high-throughput pharmacophore screenings have been rediscovered as an effective and rapid tool for guiding the selection of new hit compounds with predefined biological activity. This renaissance has also been fostered by the current possibility to generate pharmacophore hypotheses directly from crystallographic, NMR or computational models of proteinligand complexes [1,2]. In...