PHARMACOINFORMATICS: Revolutionizing drug discovery research

Pharmacoinformatics

Pharmacoinformatics is one of the latest terms added to the specialized informatics sciences which more or less flourished with the IT revolution in the 90’s. When IT had been penetrating all fields of life in society in a colossal trend, many of the industrialist and research scientist along with the pioneer academicians seriously thought about the need and application of information technology in pharmaceutical science. Although IT had been applied indirectly in drug discovery process and patient care from long, it had not been shaped as a specialized discipline until 1998 when a core of drug discovery professionals in India had a brainstorming session during a workshop named “Workshop on molecular modeling and Pharmainformatics” at NIPER. As a result, the NIPER administration took the initiative to attempt a solution for the need by starting a 2 year post-graduate course in Pharmacoinformatics.

  Pharmacoinformatics may be identified as an applied discipline dealing with application of IT and computer science in the field of drug discovery as well as patient care with special emphasis on various aspects regarding drugs. There is no clear cut boundaries defined for Pharmacoinformatics. It integrates diverse disciplines like bioinformatics, chemoinformatics along with other well developed pharmaceutical disciplines like pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, pharmacy practice and still other different disciplines like theoretical chemistry.

If we try to understand this discipline in a more detailed manner, it will become clear that Pharmacoinformatics is an applied field which emerged out of necessity. The main areas of it could be listed as following.

Bioinformatics:
Chemoinformatics:
in silico ADME-Tox Prediction:
Computational Biology:
Computational Chemistry:
Molecular Modeling:
 

Other areas are:
Pharmacy Informatics
Medical Informatics
Clinical Informatics
Biomedical Informatics
 

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Developed and maintained by Kiran V. M. Last Update June 2005