Ligand-based drug design

Ligand-based drug design (LBDD) is a drug discovery approach based on knowledge of molecules with biological activity. It is an approach that is independent of any information about the molecular target.

LBDD is based on the chemical information of the active and non-active compounds within a tested series in order to correlate the biological activity with the chemical structure (SAR – Structure Activity Relationship). LBDD involves the iterative process of chemical synthesis and bioactivity screening. The aim is to find compounds optimised for a given biological activity.

Ligand-based drug design (Computer Aided Drug Design (CADD): From Ligand-Based Methods to Structure-Based Approaches, (chapter 3, 2022)