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The Department of Biophysics, AIIMS is a center of drug discovery and clinical proteomics. It has combined the fields of structural biology, bioinformatics and proteomics seamlessly. The goal of modern research in Drug Discovery is to develop drugs that will act in a specific way with minimal side effects and also are demonstrably better than the existing therapies. The conventional approaches of Drug discovery render it a long and an expensive process. They require screening of hundreds of thousands of samples before reaching some potential compounds with desired properties. By some estimates, it takes dozens of years and millions of dollars. However, with the advances in protein structure determination, structure based drug design has emerged as a powerful tool for developing new drugs with specific properties and minimal side effects. This technique is usually faster than the conventional methods. In structure based drug design, the three-dimensional structure of a drug target interacting with small molecules is used for drug discovery. Structure-based drug design represents the idea that one can see exactly how the ligand molecule interacts with its target protein. The designed compounds that have affinities in the acceptable pharmacological range can be further processed for other biological assays and clinical trials.
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