Drug Development

Drugs are substances that exert some kind of physiological or biochemical effect on our bodies. They may be single compounds or mixtures, and their effects may be beneficial or harmful. All drugs interact with specific targets, which are usually proteins but in some cases DNA or RNA. Drugs work either by stimulating or blocking the activity of their targets. Today, more systematic approaches are used. High-throughput screening is used to test thousands of potential targets with thousands of diverse chemical compounds in order to identify promising lead compounds (chemical entities that interact with targets and therefore have potential as drugs). The alternative method of rational drug design involves the design and synthesis of compounds based on the known structure of either a specific target or one of its natural ligands. The results of the Human Genome Project and human pathogen genome projects provide many new potential drug targets. For this reason, target identification must be followed by target validation, which confirms the likelihood that interfering with the target protein will impact on the disease. Journal impact factor is an index or a criteria devised by Eugene Garfield to categorize journals based on their citations. Impact factor is considered as a putative marker to indicate the journal quality. But the recent policies being adopted to improve the impact factor is becoming a topic of controversies today. This current scenario questions the reliability of impact factor. The citation index cannot be considered to determine the scientific quality of an article because the technicalities are not considering the scientific quality. Knowing or reading an article is not enough to determine their quality validating the content and approving the findings and revalidating the facts is vital in scientific research. It is highly impossible to do a scholar check in each and every article to detect fraudulent or unsubstantial citations.

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Last date updated on April, 2024