Customer Reviews

Guidebook on Molecular Modeling in Drug Design

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The book emphasis is on different drug design techniques, specifically; The molecular modeling perspective in drug design, Molecular graphics and modeling, Molecular modeling of small molecules, Computer-assisted new lead design, Experimental techniques and data banks, Computer-assisted drug discovery, and Modeling drug-receptor interactions. The book covers in depth the docking of small molecules with protein receptors. Also the book surveys the molecular modeling packages currently used, their usage, strengths and weaknesses. The two main weaknesses of this book are (1) few illustrative figrues, (2) subjects overlapping (due to the fact that a group of authors contributed in writing this book). The book is really a guide book on molecular modeling and drug design as the title suggested.

This book is structured as set of monographs by different authors, apparently invited specifically for this book. That's a format with strengths but also some serious weaknesses.

First, the strengths. The seven chapters, plus a glossary chapter, cover a fair bit of ground. The chapter on computation hardware and graphics started aging the day it was written, but the other chapters all offer insights. The topics are varied, and include basics of docking, a nice intro to crystallization and crystallography, a description of the approval process and the team required, and a description of several trails from target molecule and native ligand to serious drug candidate. The glossary is worthwhile, and could have been expanded well beyond its 19 pages.

The weakness of this format is that, although each chapter contains introductory material, the book as a whole is not written at the introductory level. It's not quite a text, more like seven unrelated chapters flying in close formation. No one, clear underlying pattern unifies the different piece. Maybe there is a pattern, but the reader must know it already. But in that case, would the reader really need the introductions? Also, the glossary was written without respect to the other chapters so isn't really a glossary of the book that contains it.

Finally, I have to point out that this book's copyright date of 1996 makes it a bit old, by the standards of the field.

There are a number of interesting facts to be had here. They are all isolated points, though. The reader must already have a pretty good idea of the whole picture that these points fit into.