Importance of molecular computer modeling in anticancer drug development

Increasing insight into the genetics and molecular biology of cancer has resulted in the identification of an increasing number of potential molecular targets for anticancer drug discovery and development. These targets can be approached through exploitation of emerging structural biology, "rational" drug design, screening of chemical libraries, or a combination of these methods. The result is the rapid discovery of new anticancer drugs. The processes used by academic and industrial scientists to discover new drugs has recently experienced a true renaissance with many new and exciting techniques being developed in the past 5-10 years. In this review, we will attempt to outline these latest protocols that chemists and biomedical scientists are currently employing to rapidly bring new drugs to the clinic. Structure-based drug design is perhaps the most elegant approach for discovering compounds exhibiting high specificity and efficacy. Nowadays, a number of recent successful drugs have in part or in whole emerged from a structure-based research approach. Many advances including crystallography and informatics are behind these successes. Of great importance is also the impact these advances in structure-based drug design are likely to have on the economics of drug discovery. As the structures of more and more proteins and nucleic acids become available, molecular docking is increasingly considered for lead discovery. Recent studies consider the hit-rate enhancement of docking screens and the accuracy of docking structure predictions. As more structures are determined experimentally, docking against homology-modeled targets also becomes possible for more proteins. With more docking studies being undertaken, the "drug-likeness" and specificity of docking hits is also being examined. In this article we discuss the application of molecular modeling, molecular docking and virtual molecular high-throughput, targeted drug screening to anticancer drug discovery. Currently, scientists are focusing on designing and discovering potential inhibitors against cancer-related proteins that play critical roles in the development of a variety of tumors. Future research breakthroughs with the aid of computer-aided molecular design and chemo-bioinformatics will bring not only new hope, but also create a new class of anticancer drugs that will help millions of cancer patients.