CHAPTER 13:Bioinformatics for Medicinal Chemistry

With the cost of whole genome sequencing rapidly decreasing to less than $1000 per patient genomics will have a profound impact on health research and drug discovery. Stratified medicine projects are dissecting the mechanisms of complex diseases such as diabetes, asthma and cardiovascular diseases to identify patient populations for targeted treatment and oncology research, and increasingly care is being informed by the identification of the underlying genomic drivers. When the medicines researched in today’s drug discovery programmes reach the market many, if not most, patients will have their genome sequenced and pharmacogenetic considerations will likely inform both treatment and dosage regimen. This chapter gives an overview of bioinformatic tools and resources available for medicinal chemists in preclinical research programmes. The focus is on public, open access resources, in particular for generating overviews of function, modification and population variants of protein targets, generating 3D structural models to further analyse variants and homologs from animal models. Finally resources for pharmacogenetics and data integration are covered with an aim to provide practical starting points for drug discovery scientists.