Structural Pharmacology - The scope and role of structural approaches to understanding drug action.
We know now the structure and bioactive conformations of a large number of drugs complexed with their molecular targets - both those targets responsible for the therapeutic efficacy, and also those for metabolism and transport. These ability to interpret drug action at a 3-D structural level has been transformed recently by progress in the determination of structures for membrane proteins, in particular for various GPCRs, and ion-channels. Our group maintains a large-scale database of drug-like ligand bioactivity data - ChEMBL https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl and we integrate this against ligand structures and targets proteins found in PDBe, part of the wwPB consortium. In the presentation we will overview drugs and drug targets, discuss general principles of drug action that are important to factor in to analyses, and then review the current set of drug targets from a familial and structural perspective. Future directions of our own activities and community research challenges will presented.