Cloud-based high throughput virtual screening in novel drug discovery

Abstract

Drug discovery and development requires the integration of multiple scientific and technological disciplines in chemistry, biology and extensive use of information technology. Computer Aided Drug Discovery (CADD) methods are being used in this work area with several different workflows. Virtual screening (VS) is one of the most often applied CADD methods used in rational drug design, which may be applied in early stages of drug discovery pipeline. The increasing number of modular and scalable cloud-based computational platforms can assist the needs in VS studies. Such platforms are being developed to try to help researchers with various types of applications to prepare and guide the drug discovery and development pipeline. They are designed to perform VS efficiently, aimed to identify commercially available lead-like and drug-like compounds to be acquired and tested. Chemical datasets can be built, libraries can be analyzed, and structure-based or ligand-based VS studies can be performed with cloud technologies. Such platforms could also be adapted to be included in different stages of the pharmaceutical R&D process to rationalize the needs, e.g. to repurpose drugs, with various computational scalability options. This chapter introduces basic concepts and tools by outlining the general workflows of VS, and their integration to the cloud platforms. This may be a seed for further inter-disciplinary development of VS to be applied by drug hunters.