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Drug Design: Cutting Edge Approaches from Angewandte Chemie, International Edition, Vol 42, No 22, June 2003, p 2446 Drug Design: Cutting Edge Approaches |
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"The application of computational sciences to pharmaceutical research is a discipline whose time has come. A tranche of techniques, both old and new, have recently matured into potent weapons in the war against disease." These bold words appear at the beginning of the book reviewed here, which is based on contributions presented at the Royal Society of Chemistry workshop with the title "Cutting Edge Approaches to Drug Design". However, the book does not contain all contributions, because in the preface it is reported with some regret that about a half of the contributors were unable or unwilling to provide manuscripts.
To deal with the main
points straight away, the remaining contributions in this book that belong
to the categories "good" or "very good" are those on the use of
high-throughput crystallography in searching for new drugs (T.Blundell),
on the application of bioinformatics to the genome analysis of GPCRs (T.
Atwood and D. R. Flower), on virtual screening (two articles, by D. Green
and I. McLay respectively), and on the role of physical chemistry in
defining druglike properties (A. Davis and R. Riley). The literature
references cover published work up to and including 2001, and in a few
cases even up to 2002 (interesting, as the workshop took place in March
2001!). There is also an article on mutagenesis and modeling of the
TM2-Loop-TM3 region of neurotransmitter GPCRs, which seems rather out of
place in this book; this is a narrowly focused research paper which
includes a laboratory procedure for isolating GPCR mutants. All the
articles mentioned above amount to only 80 pages, considerably less than
half the book. |
The remaining 100 or so pages of the book consist of two articles of approximately equal lengths by the editor, Darren R. Flower. The first of these is a very thorough and extensive introduction to the subject (which includes some unnecessary digressions on topics such as the i11-effects of smoking and the computer-aided search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The second article is concerned with computer methods for designing vaccines (here again with an inappropriate section of several pages on the social history of epidemics and disasters, including details of the numbers of deaths from smallpox, AIDS, wars, famines, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions). This is not at all the kind of information that a reader expects from the title of the book. The introduction mentioned above also suffers from the disadvantage that the main specialty of the author, who is a researcher at the Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccines Research, Newbury, UK, is in the modeling of proteins rather than in main-stream drug research. Consequently the literature citations do not provide a representative picture of the most widely used methods. The editor's stated aim of presenting here a book that can be understood by the lay person and is also stimulating for the expert has produced a curious result; there is indeed something in it for everyone, but it does not fulfill the stated objective. For anyone interested in reading about some individual facets of drug research, ranging from social history to special experimental techniques and computer methods and to (possible) future developments in vaccines, this book can be recommended. Specialists in the field will derive more benefit from reading original papers and recent review articles. Hugo Kubinyi Weisenheim am Sand (Germany)
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