Drug discovery FAQs: workflows for answering multidomain drug discovery questions

Drug Discov Today. 2015 Apr;20(4):399-405. doi: 10.1016/j.drudis.2014.11.006. Epub 2014 Nov 20.

Abstract

Modern data-driven drug discovery requires integrated resources to support decision-making and enable new discoveries. The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform (http://dev.openphacts.org) was built to address this requirement by focusing on drug discovery questions that are of high priority to the pharmaceutical industry. Although complex, most of these frequently asked questions (FAQs) revolve around the combination of data concerning compounds, targets, pathways and diseases. Computational drug discovery using workflow tools and the integrated resources of Open PHACTS can deliver answers to most of these questions. Here, we report on a selection of workflows used for solving these use cases and discuss some of the research challenges. The workflows are accessible online from myExperiment (http://www.myexperiment.org) and are available for reuse by the scientific community.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Access to Information
  • Computational Biology*
  • Data Mining
  • Databases, Chemical*
  • Databases, Pharmaceutical*
  • Decision Support Techniques*
  • Drug Discovery / methods*
  • Humans
  • Molecular Structure
  • Pharmaceutical Preparations / chemistry*
  • Signal Transduction / drug effects
  • Structure-Activity Relationship
  • Systems Integration
  • Workflow*

Substances

  • Pharmaceutical Preparations