The pharmaceutical industry relies on numerous well-designed experiments involving high-throughput techniques and
in silico
approaches to analyze potential drug targets. These
methods are often predictive, yielding faster and less expensive analyses than traditional
in vivo
or
in vitro
procedures.
In Silico
Technologies in Drug Target Identification and Validation
addresses the challenge of testing a growing number of new potential targets and reviews currently available
approaches for identifying and validating these targets. The book emphasizes computational tools, public and commercial databases, mathematical methods, and software for interpreting complex experimental data. The book describes how these tools are used to visualize a target structure, identify binding sites, and predict behavior. World-renowned researchers cover many topics not typically found in most informatics books, including functional annotation, siRNA design, pathways, text mining, ontologies, systems biology, database management, data pipelining, and pharmacogenomics.
Covering issues that range from prescreening target selection to genetic modeling and valuable data integration,
is a self-contained and practical guide to the various computational tools that can accelerate the identification and validation stages of drug target discovery and determine the biological functionality of potential targets more effectively.
Daniel E. Levy, editor of the
Drug Discovery Series
, is the founder of DEL BioPharma, a consulting service for drug discovery programs. He also maintains a blog that explores organic chemistry.