Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics is a research field related to bioinformatics but with the focus on studying biological and chemical processes in the pharmaceutical area; to understand how xenobiotics interact with the human body and the drug discovery process.
Contents
Introduction
Whereas traditional bioinformatics is a wide subject it has a large focus on molecular biology, pharmaceutical bioinformatics more specifically targets chemical-biological interaction and exploratory focus of chemical and biological interactors using e.g. cheminformatics and chemometrics methods. Methods include, apart from many general bioinformatics methods, ligand-based modeling such as Quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) and proteochemometrics, computer-aided molecular design, chembioinformatics databases, algorithms for chemical software, and biopharmaceutical chemistry including analyses of biological activity and other issues related to drug discovery.
Software and tools
There are many software tools for pharmaceutical bioinformatics. An example of an open source tool is the Bioclipse workbench.
Conferences
One conference specific to Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics is "International Conference on Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics" (ICPB) (http://www.icpb.net)