[Bioanalytics in medicinal chemistry: from assay development to evolutive drug design]

During the last decade, the focus of bioanalytics shifted from the mere analysis of biomacromolecules to the application of proteins and nucleic acids for analytical purposes, e.g. accessing the biological role of cellular constituents, target identification and validation, quantification of receptor-ligand interactions and others. The increasing impact of combining biomacromolecules with standard analytic devices can be exemplified by the central role of DNA and protein micro-arrays in the fields of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics or pharmacogenomics. Medicinal chemistry is considered as the scientific discipline concerned with the discovery, design, identification, and preparation of biologically active compounds and the interpretation of their mode of action at the molecular level and their metabolites. From this definition it is evident that bioanalytical tools put into service of medicinal chemistry needs can contribute substantially to progress in drug discovery, design and identification, especially in cases when these tools are well-adapted for miniaturisation and automation to enable high throughput screening. Many successful examples of combining biomacromolecules with standard instrumental analytics indicate that the former role of biochemical testing in medicinal chemistry is more and more replaced by what we call molecular bioanalytics. In recent research, we showed how molecular biology methods and whole cell approaches can be integrated into new bioanalytical tools of complex assembly and how these tools are applicable for drug discovery, drug synthesis and high throughput screening. This is exemplified by the evolutive development of enzyme inhibitors for targets in chronic inflammatory diseases (cathepsin G) or cancer (CK2, hyaluronidase).