Metabolism-based drug design and drug targeting

Even at the early stages of drug discovery and structure-based drug design, the pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic and toxicological consequences of drug metabolism cannot be ignored. Drug metabolism is also of interest to medicinal chemists in the design of drugs with controlled, predictable deactivation after achieving the therapeutic objective in prodrug design and in chemical-enzymatic drug targeting. In this review, the authors provide an overview of concepts that can be utilized from drug discovery to pharmaceutical development to overcome problems associated with drug metabolism, or that may be used to take advantage of 'designed-in' metabolic activation to achieve drug targeting.