Computer aided drug design (CADD)

 Computer aided drug design (CADD) exploits state of art technologies to speed upthe drug development process. Molecular modelling and computational chemistry are assuming an increasing important role in understanding the basis of drug receptor interaction and assisting the medicinal chemists in the design of new therapeutic agent. Traditional drug development has demerits like random screening, chance discovery, a typical process for a drug is approx. 12 years and    expenditure is over $ 300 million. CADD is one of the tools which can be used to increase the efficiency of a drug discovery process. CADD has advantages like target specific and 3D structure based, fast and automatic, very low cost and high success rate. CADD helps in better understanding the details of the problem and to refine their approach and it helps to guide further experimental planning and potentially makes this process more efficient. CADD can be beneficial to find cure for diseases like cancer and AIDS. Cancer causing H- Ras p²¹ mutant protein can be studied by this technology. In HIV, it is proved that there are 87 HIV proteases deposited, whose active sites and important polypeptide chain are different. Many pharmaceutical industry have started  using CADD as a tool of the discovery. The addition of CADD technologies to the research and drug discovery approaches could lead to a reduction of up to 50% cost in the drug design.