What is a lead? Before getting into drug design or drug
discovery, we must know what a lead is on which drugs are
designed. Lead is basically a compound or a tiny organic
molecule which shows desired biological action on any validated
molecular target. It can be any organic/inorganic compound.
Where leads can be found? Leads can be found easily in libraries
like peptide libraries, carbohydrate libraries or natural
product libraries. We can also create Virtual Libraries by using
combinatorial chemistry. Lead Identification and Technologies
Involved The process of lead identification is carried out with
following technologies: - Actual screening Actual screening is
actually a part of chemi-informatics and is used to identify
lead. In this, compound screening or docking based on protein
structure is involved and molecule based chemical similarity
search is carried out. There are some important considerations
before carrying a virtual or actual screening. E.g. which type
of compound you are going to put against r