Revisiting de novo drug design: receptor based pharmacophore screening

De novo drug design methods such as receptor or protein based pharmacophore modeling present a unique opportunity to generate novel ligands by employing the potential binding sites even when no explicit ligand information is known for a particular target. Recent developments in molecular modeling programs have enhanced the ability of early programs such as LUDI or Pocket that not only identify the key interactions or hot spots at the suspected binding site, but also and convert these hot spots into three-dimensional search queries and virtual screening of the property filtered synthetic libraries. Together with molecular docking studies and consensus scoring schemes they would enrich the lead identification processes. In this review, we discuss the ligand and receptor based de novo drug design approaches with selected examples.