title: Application of chemical biology in target identification and drug discovery.
abstract: Drug discovery and development is vital to the well-being of mankind and sustainability of the pharmaceutical industry. Using chemical biology approaches to discover drug leads has become a widely accepted path partially because of the completion of the Human Genome Project. Chemical biology mainly solves biological problems through searching previously unknown targets for pharmacologically active small molecules or finding ligands for well-defined drug targets. It is a powerful tool to study how these small molecules interact with their respective targets, as well as their roles in signal transduction, molecular recognition and cell functions. There have been an increasing number of new therapeutic targets being identified and subsequently validated as a result of advances in functional genomics, which in turn led to the discovery of numerous active small molecules via a variety of high-throughput screening initiatives. In this review, we highlight some applications of chemical biology in the context of drug discovery.
authors.affiliation: The National Center for Drug Screening and the CAS Key Laboratory of Receptor Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201203, China.
authors.forename: Yue
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: The National Center for Drug Screening and the CAS Key Laboratory of Receptor Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201203, China.
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.affiliation: The National Center for Drug Screening and the CAS Key Laboratory of Receptor Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201203, China.
authors.forename: Saifei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lei
authors.affiliation: The National Center for Drug Screening and the CAS Key Laboratory of Receptor Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201203, China.
authors.forename: Fulai
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: The National Center for Drug Screening and the CAS Key Laboratory of Receptor Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201203, China. mwwang@simm.ac.cn.|School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, 200031, China. mwwang@simm.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Ming-Wei
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002626:Chemistry, Pharmaceutical / Q000379:methods*; D016503:Drug Delivery Systems / Q000379:methods*; D055808:Drug Discovery / Q000379:methods*; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D040901:Proteomics / Q000379:methods
keywords: Chemical biology; Drug discovery; Genomics; High-throughput screening (HTS); Proteomics; Target validation