What Is Rational Drug Design?
Throughout most of the history of medical science, new drugs have been discovered though a process of trial-and-error or simply through sheer luck. As the demand for new and more effective drugs has increased, a new method of drug development called rational drug design has begun to replace the old methods. In rational drug design, biologically active compounds are specifically designed or chosen to work with a particular drug target. Rational drug design often involves the use of molecular design software, which researchers use to create three-dimensional models of drugs and their biological targets. For this reason, the process is also known as computer-aided drug design. A drug target, or biological target, is usually one of two types. The first type is a molecule in the human body that causes disease when it is defective in some way. The second is a molecule from a disease-causing microorganism. Drug development involves discovering or designing new chemical compounds that interact
