New Approaches to NMR Data Acquisition, Assignment and Protein Structure Determination: Potential Impact in Drug Discovery

The majority of drugs available today were discovered either from chance observations or from the screening of synthetic or natural product libraries. The chemical modification of lead compounds, on a trial-and-error basis, typically led to compounds with improved potency, selectivity, bioavailability, and reduced toxicity. However, this approach is labor- and time-intensive, and researchers in the pharmaceutical industry are constantly developing methods with a view to increasing the efficiency of the drug discovery process. One of these relatively new approaches is the so-called rational drug design that relies heavily in the determination, either by X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spesctroscopy, of the three-dimensional structures of the targets and the ligand-target complexes.