CoMFA -3D QSAR approach in drug design.

ABSTRACT

Progress in medicinal chemistry and in drug design depends on our ability to understand the interactions of drugs with their biological targets. Classical QSAR studies describe biological activity in terms of physicochemical properties of substituents in certain positions of the drug molecules. The detailed discussion of the present state of the art should enable scientists to further develop and improve these powerful new tools. Comparative Molecular Field Analysis (CoMFA) is a mainstream and down-toearth 3D QSAR technique in the coverage of drug discovery and development. Even though CoMFA is remarkable for high predictive capacity, the intrinsic data-dependent characteristic still makes this methodology certainly be handicapped by noise. It's well known that the default settings in CoMFA can bring about predictive QSAR models, in the meanwhile optimized parameters was proven to provide more predictive results. Accordingly, so far numerous endeavors have been accomplished to ameliorate the CoMFA model’s robustness and predictive accuracy by considering various factors, including molecular conformation and alignment, field descriptors and grid spacing. In the present article we are going to discuss the basic approaches of CoMFA in drug design.