A Review on Applications of Computational Methods in Drug Screening and Design

Abstract

Drug development is one of the most significant processes in the pharmaceutical industry. Various computational methods have dramatically reduced the time and cost of drug discovery. In this review, we firstly discussed roles of multiscale biomolecular simulations in identifying drug binding sites on the target macromolecule and elucidating drug action mechanisms. Then, virtual screening methods (e.g., molecular docking, pharmacophore modeling, and QSAR) as well as structure-and ligand-based classical/de novo drug design were introduced and discussed. Last, we explored the development of machine learning methods and their applications in aforementioned computational methods to speed up the drug discovery process. Also, several application examples of combining various methods was discussed. A combination of different methods to jointly solve the tough problem at different scales and dimensions will be an inevitable trend in drug screening and design.Molecules 2020, 25, 1375 2 of 17 Biomolecular Simulations in Drug Screening and DesignThe Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel for their pioneering contributions in the development of multiscale models for complex biochemical systems, recognizing the important role that theory and computational methods play as a direct and necessary complement to experiments [12]. Further, applications of biomolecular simulations in identifying drug binding sites and elucidating the molecular mechanisms of diseases have been subject to rapid developments [13][14][15].Depending on the biological problems to be studied, multiscale models will be used in biomolecular simulations. The combination of quantum mechanics (QM) and molecular mechanics (MM) (QM/MM) can be used to study the electronic properties [16], simulate chemical reactions (e.g., the enzyme catalysis mechanism [17]), and calculate spectra [18] in a single simulation, which can be used to elucidate the action mechanism of certain drugs. Another widely used biomolecular method is molecular dynamics (MD) simulation [19][20][21][22][23][24], which applies empirical molecular mechanics (MM) force fields and is based on classical Newtonian mechanics. According to different accuracy requirements, all-atom (AA), united-atom (UA), and coarse-grained (CG) MD simulations as well as explicit/implicit solvent models, which allow simulations of temporal and spatial scales, can be used to facilitate the drug discovery [25,26]. Generally, MD simulations have been used for the identification of potential drug binding sites on target proteins, the calculation of binding free energy between target proteins and drug molecules, the action mechanism of drug molecules, etc. [27,28]. However, it is worth mentioning that MD simulations are also limited to time and length scales. Currently, AAMD simulations can explore time-dependent phenomena of large systems such as viral capsids in atomic detail as long as microseconds or even milliseconds [21,29,30]. Therefore, different types of ...

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