Use of Bioinformatics in High-Throughput Drug Screening

Bioinformatics has emerged as a vital component of almost all the fields of biological sciences. Its ability to quickly generate, analyze, and interpret large amounts of data has enabled researchers to integrate it into drug discovery and development. The traditional process of drug discovery had its limitations including increased time consumption and cost, low success rates, inaccurate drug target selection, regulatory and ethical concerns, and lack of personalization. To overcome these challenges, bioinformatics has gained much interest in different stages of drug discovery. In this chapter, we summarize the role of bioinformatics in the high-throughput drug screening process involving both ligand-based and structure-based screening strategies. The most prominent advantage it offers is the ability to handle large amounts of data within seconds to minutes. This chapter also provides a brief account of various bioinformatics tools and databases which have a prominent role in the drug screening process. Although bioinformatics has been proven beneficial, it still has some limitations in terms of the complexity of data that is handled. With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is expected that it would definitely strengthen the biomedical field.