Drug action is often mediated via an interaction with a macromolecular target such as an enzyme or receptor. In ‘structure-based drug design’, knowledge of the three dimensional structure of the macromolecular target is used to identify compounds that can bind the target with high specificity, resulting in inhibition or activation of the target and its effector systems.
Research in structure-based design employs a range of techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography and molecular modelling to obtain structural information about drugs and their macromolecular targets.
