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Cheminformatics

Article  in  Journal of Proteomics & Bioinformatics · January 2010

DOI: 10.4172/jpb.1000147 · Source: DOAJ

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Journal of Proteomics & Bioinformatics - Open Access Research Article
OPEN ACCESS Freely available online
doi:10.4172/jpb.1000147
www.omicsonline.com JPB/Vol.3 Issue 8

Cheminformatics
Nutan Prakash* and Dinta A. Gareja
Department of Biotechnology, Shree M . & N. Virani Science College, India

Abstract
Cheminformatics is the application of computational methods to chemical problems, with particular emphasis on
the manipulation of structural information. Cheminformatics is a relatively new field of information technology that
focuses on the collection, storage, analysis, and manipulation of chemical data. The chemical data of interest typically
includes information on small molecule formulas, structures, properties, spectra, and activities (biological or industrial).
Cheminformatics originally emerged as a vehicle to help the drug discovery and development process; however
Cheminformatics now plays an increasingly important role in many areas of biology, chemistry, and biochemistry.
Cheminformatics can also be applied to data analysis for various industries like paper and pulp, dyes and such applied
industries.

Introduction discovery and development. Most encouraging is the continuing

emergence of new natural product chemo types with interesting
Cheminformatics is the use of computer and informational structures and biological activities and potential for sub-library
techniques, applied to a range of problems in the field of chemistry. generation of targeted screening. Increasingly available as pure
Also known as Cheminformatics and chemical informatics, these compounds, natural products are highly amenable to the much broader
techniques are used in pharmaceutical companies in the process screening opportunities presented by the new targets. Regardless of
of Drug Discovery. Cheminformatics combines the scientific chemical library input, natural products are uniquely well placed to
working fields of Chemistry and computer science especially in provide structural information from which virtual compounds can be
the area of chemical Graph theory and mining the chemical space. created by computational chemistry and applied technologies. The
It is to be expected that the chemical space contains at least 1062 structural versatility of natural products is expected to play a major
molecules. Cheminformatics is a generic term that encompasses role in modern drug discovery programs (Moore and Nisbet, 1997).
the design, creation, organization, management, retrieval, analysis,
dissemination, visualization, and use of chemical information. The Cheminformatics and Drug Discovery
transformation of data into information and of information into
knowledge is an endeavor needed in any branch of chemistry not Introduction
only in drug design. Chemistry has produced an enormous amount Competition and cost has changed the drug design paradigm
of data and this data avalanche is rapidly increasing. More than 45 from the hit and trial approach to the drug design approach allowing
million chemical compounds are known and this number is increasing the tailor-made design of active molecules. This has resulted in both
by several millions each year. Novel techniques such as combinatorial targeted drug discovery and reduced drug development cycle time.
chemistry and high-throughput screening generate huge amounts of The need for introducing newer molecules that are superior using an
data. All this data and information can only be managed and made
accessible by storing them in proper databases. That is only possible
through Cheminformatics.
Definition
Cheminformatics is the application of informatics methods to
solve chemical problems.

Role of Natural Product Chemistry in

Cheminformatics
A natural product is an important sector in the area of drug
Figure 2:

Environmental
effects & Hazards Spectroscopy
Analysis and *Corresponding author: Nutan Prakash, Department of Biotechnology, Shree M .
Modeling
& N. Virani Science College, India, E-mail: [email protected]

Chenical and Received July 31, 2010; Accepted August 31, 2010; Published August 31,
Chemical Environment
physical reference Information 2010
Data Systems
Citation: Prakash N, Gareja DA (2010) Cheminformatics. J Proteomics Bioinform
Pharmocology 3: 249-252. doi:10.4172/jpb.1000147
Toxicology
Regulations
Copyright: © 2010 Prakash N, et al. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
Figure 1: unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original author and source are credited.

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Citation: Prakash N, Gareja DA (2010) Cheminformatics. J Proteomics Bioinform 3: 249-252. doi:10.4172/jpb.1000147

throughput screening (HTS), automated techniques have made

possible robotized screening. Through this process, hundreds of
thousands of individual compounds can be screened per drug target
per year (Barrett et al., 1994; Hecht, 2002). Since biologists can now
test thousands of compounds per day, chemists are required to
make enough compounds to meet the needs of biologists. But, can
chemists make thousands of compounds a day?
Combinatorial chemistry
In response to the increased demand for new compounds
by biologists, chemists started using combinatorial chemical
technologies to produce more new compounds in shorter periods.
Figure 3:
Combinatorial chemistry (CC) systematically and repetitively yields a
large array of compounds from sets of different types of reagents,
called “building blocks”. By 2000, many solution- and solid-phase CC
strategies were well-developed (Hall et al., 2001). Parallel syntheses
techniques are nowadays used in all major pharmaceutical companies.
By increasi ng the capabilities of making and testing compounds, it
was hoped that the drug discovery process could be accelerated
dramatically. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case.
Seeking the reasons for these disappointing results, it was believed
that increasing the chemical diversity of compound libraries would
enhance the drug discovery process. Cheminformatics approaches
would now be introduced in order to optimize the chemical diversity
of libraries.
Figure 4:
Chemical diversity and cheminformatics
It was soon realized that millions of compounds could be
made by CC technologies. However, this procedure did not yield
O many drug candidates. In order to avoid wasting CC efforts, it was
DNA NH O believed that it would be best to make chemically diverse compound
libraries. In order to make a compound library with great chemical
NH O diversity, a variety of structural processing technologies for
+ diversity analyses were created and applied. These computational
approaches are the components of Cheminformatics. After 1990,
Ph Ph
many chemical-diversity-related approaches were developed, such as
O P O HN structural descriptor computations, structural similarity algorithms,
NH
DNA
O
classification algorithms, diversified compound selections, and
CH
library enumerations. However, help from these diversity analyses
Figure 5: approaches has been limited. More hits have been found from these
chemically diverse libraries, but most of these hits do not result in
new drugs. Therefore, the process of making and screening drug-like
automated approach will make drug discovery a highly knowledge
compounds came under question.
specific and efficient process.
Traditional drug discovery process Applications
There are seven steps in the drug discovery process: disease The use of information technology and management has
selection, target hypothesis, lead compound identification become a critical part of the drug discovery process as well as to
(screening), lead optimization, pre-clinical trail, and clinical trial
and pharmacogenomic optimization. Traditionally, these steps are
carried out sequentially (Augen, 2002), and if one of the steps is slow,
it slows down the entire process. These slow steps are bottlenecks.
The old bottlenecks and HTS Technologies
Previously, the main bottlenecks in drug discovery were the time
and costs of making (or finding) and testing new chemical entities
(NCE). The average cost of creating a NCE in a major pharmaceutical
company was estimated at around $7,500/compound (Augen, 2002).
In order to reduce costs, pharmaceutical companies have had to
find new technologies to replace the old “hand-crafted” synthesis Figure 6:
and testing NCE approaches. Since 1980, with the advent of high

J Proteomics Bioinform
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ISSN:0974-276X JPB, an open access journal

Journal of Proteomics & Bioinformatics - Open Access Research Article
OPEN ACCESS Freely available online
doi:10.4172/jpb.1000147
www.omicsonline.com JPB/Vol.3 Issue 8

solve the chemical problems. So, Cheminformatics is the mixing rest with the user’s decision. In parallel, another area that is gaining
of those information resources to transform data into information greater importance is the development of filtering procedures
and information into knowledge for the intended purpose of which identifies molecules that exhibit some sort of undesirable
making better decisions faster in the area of drug lead identification characteristic (toxicity, high reactivity etc.)
and organization. Cheminformatics is the use of computer and
Without a proper knowledge base, lead optimization is a search
informational techniques, applied to a range of problems in the
in the vast darkness of chemistry space. It may lead to the wrong
field of chemistry. Also known as Cheminformatics and chemical
direction in the drug discovery program. Establishing a proper
informatics, these techniques are used in pharmaceutical companies
database with complete test results may lead to organizational
in the process of Drug Discovery.
success in drug discovery developments (Figure 8).
Current Status Combinatorial chemistry has opened up new strategies for a
Recent advances in virtual screening track computational more comprehensive parallel approach to sweeping and searching
capability and as the processing power of computers improves, so do during lead optimization, which has necessitated the development of
screening speed and complexity. Parameters such a structure, function suitable and new library design principles.
or chemical space allow for a nearly limitless array of screening
options. The use of screening data for development decision making
Recent Development in Cheminformatics
is predicated from the management and interpretation of the data. The technological developments in combinatorial synthesis and
Extraction of information from the data is the vital link between HTS have brought about an increase, by several orders of magnitude,
theoretical design and the drug candidate. Finally, it is the integration in the volumes of data that need to be processed in drug discovery
of iterative results from computation to activity that drives the cycle programmes. This explosion of both structural and bioactivity
forward. Library chemistry and high-throughput screening require data has further hastened the need to integrate two areas of
the greater use of chemo informatics to increase their effectiveness. chemical computation that had previously developed, on the whole,
However to identify types of procedure which yield the best result separately. Chemical information techniques have been developed
and address factors such as cost, availability and synthetic feasibility for the storage and retrieval of information from databases of
chemical articles and chemical structures, both corporate and public.
The computer processing required for such system is relatively
Identify Select Design Screen Final Entry
simple in nature, although extremely impressive in terms of the data
Disease Target Primary
Screen
Identify
“HIT”
Selection
of best leads
Into
Development
volumes involved (hundreds of thousands or millions of molecules).
Conversely, molecular modeling techniques have traditionally been
used for the detailed analysis of datasets that contain a few tens, or at
1,00,000
Compunds
5 Compunds most a few hundreds, of molecules, with the aim of using knowledge
about their conformations and energies, inter alia, to predict their
biological activities. Extending these methods for analyzing SARs
Figure 7: Drug discovery funnel. to data volumes typical of those routinely handled in chemical
information systems, is a data mining challenge that is now being
faced by most drug discovery organizations. Third, there is no doubt
Drug
that informatics is an idea whose time has come, or is coming, in an
Identify Leads Optimize Candidates increasingly wide range of disciplines. Bioinformatics is, of course,
now a widely recognized discipline, the establishment of which has
been driven mainly by the data explosion resulting from the Human
Effective
85% Genome and related sequencing projects. Medical informatics and
100% “Chemo”
Filter health informatics are also well established and references are
starting to appear to, for example, educational informatics and neural
INPUT Survival Rate
science informatics.
Figure 8: Need for effective chemo informatics filter. Grand Challenges for Cheminformatics
There are three “grand challenge” areas. They should be an
important focus for cheminformatics.
Overcoming stalld drug discovery
After the impressive successes in drug discovery toward the
end of the last century, productivity in the pharmaceutical industry
has declined as expenses have gone up. Cheminformatics can
help by enabling fast, cheap virtual experiments to prioritize real
experiments. As more drug discovery research is carried out in
academia, institutes and small companies, and solutions will require
pieces from cheminformatics, bioinformatics and other disciplines,
cheminformatics knowledge and tools should be made as widely
Figure 9: available as possible.

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Citation: Prakash N, Gareja DA (2010) Cheminformatics. J Proteomics Bioinform 3: 249-252. doi:10.4172/jpb.1000147

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