Bioinformatics in drug development and assessment

Bioinformatics is playing an increasingly important role in nearly all aspects of drug discovery, drug assessment, and drug development. This growing importance lies not only in the role that bioinformatics plays in handling large volumes of data, but also in the utility of bioinformatics tools to predict, analyze, or help interpret clinical and preclinical findings. This review focuses on describing and evaluating some of the newer or more important bioinformatics resources ( i. e., databases and software) that are of growing importance to understanding or predicting drug metabolism, especially with respect to the absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, ( ADME), and toxicity ( T) of both existing drugs and potential drug leads. Detailed descriptions and critical assessments of a number of potentially useful bioinformatics/ cheminformatics databases and predictive ADMET software tools are provided. Additionally, several pharmaceutically important applications of both the databases and software are highlighted. Given the rapid growth in this area and the rapid changes that are taking place, a special emphasis is placed on freely available or Web- accessible resources.