Virtual Pharmacology

New moves forward in drug creation.

‘Virtual Pharmacology’ Advance Tackles Universe of Unknown Drugs
University of California, San Francisco
By Nicholas Weiler

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of North Carolina have developed the world's largest virtual pharmacology platform. The platform, which will soon contain over a billion virtual molecules never before synthesized and not found in nature, is capable of identifying extremely powerful new drugs and is poised to dramatically change early drug discovery. The researchers partnered with Ukraine-based Enamine Ltd., to begin incorporating the company's vast virtual catalogue of drug-like compounds into their free public drug discovery database, called ZINC. The researchers are in the process of converting hundreds of millions of Enamine's theoretical molecules into three-dimensional chemical models compatible with a computational pharmacology approach called "docking." Docking makes it possible to rapidly simulate in three dimensions how hundreds of millions of potential drugs would bind to a specific biological target of interest. ... "