NMR in the acceleration of drug discovery

The field of NMR spectroscopy has grown beyond expectations from the first historic observation of nuclear magnetic resonance in 1946 by Bloch and Purcell, to the first generation of protein structures 20 years ago, to the present where NMR structures now represent 15 to 20% of those submitted to the Protein Data Bank (PDB). However, the applications of NMR go far beyond structure determination. Since NMR is a non-invasive technique that provides a wealth of information about structure and dynamics, it is an ideal analytical method that is now being used in every step of the drug discovery and development process. Indeed, NMR is undergoing a renaissance in the pharmaceutical industry as a plethora of new applications have been developed, ranging from in vitro screening methods in early stage discovery to in vivo magnetic resonance imaging techniques used to assess drug efficacy in clinical trials. In this review, we will present an overview of the role of NMR in these areas, with a special focus on how NMR is poised to revolutionize the high-throughput structural characterization of protein-ligand interactions.