Web Resources to explore the Interaction between Drugs and their Targets

One of the main methods used to understand the relationship between a drug and its natural targets was and still remains laboratory studies. Pharmacological studies have been performed in order to explore the characteristics of drug-target complexes. Since proteins detain a fundamental role in disease treatment, these studies search for drug-protein complex properties. Cell lines, membrane fragments or isolated enzymes are used to measure different properties such as potency, affinity and constants. However, even if this method has brought to market almost the entire number of known drugs, new tools have emerged in the last decades. They exploit data already collected to examine drug-target interactions. New methods are sustained by new technologies. Web and computational resources have been developed and adapted in order to analyse drug-target complexes at atomic resolution. This type of analysis is carried on by a computer, making it cheaper and faster than the classical pharmacological approach. This thesis tries to depict how web data are generated, where they can be stored, and the means by which researchers can make use of them. In the first section it will be shown how structural data about protein and their complexes are acquired. Structural data of drug, target and drug-target have been collected in databanks and databases and can be easily used as primary sources in both pharmacological and drug discovery field. So, a deeper insight in the most important databases and tools associated with data analysis will follow. Finally, a notable example concerning a new approach in drug discovery, the degraders, will illustrate how different data merge and how structural bioinformatics can lead the way not only to new pharmacological studies but also to new horizons in drug discovery.