Drug research encompasses several diverse disciplines united by a common goal, namely the development of novel therapeutic agents. The search for new drugs can be divided functionally into two stages: discovery and development. The former consists of setting up a working hypothesis of the target enzyme or receptor for a particular disease, establishing suitable models (or surrogate markers) to test biological activities, and screening the new drug molecules for in vitro and/or in vivo biological activities. In the development stage, efforts are focused on evaluation of the toxicity and...

Information technology provides several databases, data analysis tools, and knowledge extraction techniques in almost every facet of life. In pharmaceutical sciences, several successful attempts are being made under the umbrella of pharmacoinformatics (synonymously referred to as pharmainformatics).Chemoinformatics and bioinformatics contribute directly to drug discovery through virtual screening. Topics like neuroinformatics, immunoinformatics, vaccine informatics, and biosystem informatics contribute indirectly by providing necessary inputs for pharmaceutical design in this area. Topics...