Pharmacoinformatics

Drug discovery

Drug discovery

In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which drugs are discovered or designed.In the past most drugs have been discovered either by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery...

 and development

Drug development

Drug development is a blanket term used to define the process of bringing a new drug to the market once a lead compound has been identified through the process of drug discovery...

 requires the integration of multiple scientific and technological disciplines. These include chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

, biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

, pharmacology

Pharmacology

Pharmacology is the branch of medicine and biology concerned with the study of drug action. More specifically, it is the study of the interactions that occur between a living organism and chemicals that affect normal or abnormal biochemical function...

, pharmaceutical technology and extensive use of information technology

Information technology

Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

. The latter is increasingly recognised as Pharmacoinformatics.

Definition

Pharmacoinformatics may be defined as: Implementation and use of information technologies for the discovery and development of drugs as well as in pharmacy education. It sometimes is also referred as chembioinformatics.

Introduction

Main idea behind the field is to integrate plethora informatics branches viz chemoinformatics, bioinformatics, inmmunoinformatics etc to single platform, resulting in seamless process of drug discovery.
First dedicated department for Pharmacoinformatics was established at National Institute Of Pharmaceutical Education And Research, S.A.S. Nagar, India in 2003. Which is followed by different universities worldwide.