title: iDrug: a web-accessible and interactive drug discovery and design platform.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The progress in computer-aided drug design (CADD) approaches over the past decades accelerated the early-stage pharmaceutical research. Many powerful standalone tools for CADD have been developed in academia. As programs are developed by various research groups, a consistent user-friendly online graphical working environment, combining computational techniques such as pharmacophore mapping, similarity calculation, scoring, and target identification is needed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We presented a versatile, user-friendly, and efficient online tool for computer-aided drug design based on pharmacophore and 3D molecular similarity searching. The web interface enables binding sites detection, virtual screening hits identification, and drug targets prediction in an interactive manner through a seamless interface to all adapted packages (e.g., Cavity, PocketV.2, PharmMapper, SHAFTS). Several commercially available compound databases for hit identification and a well-annotated pharmacophore database for drug targets prediction were integrated in iDrug as well. The web interface provides tools for real-time molecular building/editing, converting, displaying, and analyzing. All the customized configurations of the functional modules can be accessed through featured session files provided, which can be saved to the local disk and uploaded to resume or update the history work.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  iDrug is easy to use, and provides a novel, fast and reliable tool for conducting drug design experiments. By using iDrug, various molecular design processing tasks can be submitted and visualized simply in one browser without installing locally any standalone modeling softwares. iDrug is accessible free of charge at http://lilab.ecust.edu.cn/idrug.
authors: Shanghai Key Laboratory of New Drug Design, State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, School of Pharmacy, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Xia
authors: X
authors: Wang
authors: School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Haipeng
authors: H
authors: Chen
authors: School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Feng
authors: F
authors: Yang
authors: School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Jiayu
authors: J
authors: Gong
authors: Shanghai Key Laboratory of New Drug Design, State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, School of Pharmacy, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Shiliang
authors: S
authors: Li
authors: BNLMS, Center for Quantitative Biology, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors: Jianfeng
authors: J
authors: Pei
authors: Shanghai Key Laboratory of New Drug Design, State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, School of Pharmacy, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Xiaofeng
authors: X
authors: Liu
authors: Shanghai Key Laboratory of New Drug Design, State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, School of Pharmacy, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Hualiang
authors: H
authors: Jiang
authors: BNLMS, Center for Quantitative Biology, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors: Luhua
authors: L
authors: Lai
authors: Shanghai Key Laboratory of New Drug Design, State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, School of Pharmacy, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China ; School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
authors: Honglin
authors: H
authors: Li
keywords: 3D similarity calculation; Cavity detection; Online drug design platform; Pharmacophore search; Target prediction