New strategies for pharmaceutical design.

Parallel synthesis and testing procedures are being investigated to shorten the drug design and discovery process. These procedures have focused on peptides and nucleotides, although these compounds are unlikely to be useful therapeutics because of their low bioavailability and sensitivity to enzymatic degradation. More recently, the use of other modular systems with distinct linking chemistries have been explored. Structural data combined with computational screens of compound databases provides an alternative method to identify novel nonpeptide pharmaceuticals. When structural information is not available, homology-based models have proved to be sufficient to identify nonpeptide inhibitors active at low micromolar concentrations against important enzymes in parasite life cycles.