Journal of Pharmaceutical Care & Health Systems
Open Access

Polypharmacology in Modern Drug Development

Uchechi Sade^{* *}Correspondence: Uchechi Sade, Department of Pharmacy, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria, Email:

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Description

Drug research and discovery is a time-consuming and costly procedure. The efforts of drug development have been greatly accelerated as a result of the exponential growth of molecular data and rapid technological advancements. Polypharmacology is a term for the idea of drug design, which has evolved from "one drug, one target" to "one drug, numerous targets." Polypharmacology is gaining traction as the future drug discovery paradigm. A single medicine operating on several targets of a single illness route, or single drug acting on multiple targets pertaining to multiple disease pathways, are examples of polypharmacological phenomena. Furthermore, polypharmacology for complicated disorders is likely to use numerous medications that act on different targets that are part of networks that regulate different physiological responses. Polypharmacology argues that by influencing many sites, more effective medications can be generated. Complicated disorders, such as cancer and central nervous system ailments, are thought to necessitate complex therapeutic approaches. In this regard, a medicine that "hits" several sensitive nodes within a network of interacting targets has the potential to increase efficacy while also limiting the downsides associated with using a single-target therapy or a combination of treatments. Polypharmacological drug profiles can have additive or synergistic effects while lowering side effects, which helps to explain why essential medications like aspirin have such a high therapeutic success rate. Polypharmacology can also be used to combat the problem of drug resistance. One of the most popular approaches for dealing with bacterial drug resistance is to employ wide spectrum antibiotics, which has a long history. The clonal selection for drug-resistant BCR-ABL alleles during therapy, a general downside of target-specific monotherapy in cancer is that a single genetic change providing target resistance to an individual tumor cell can eventually lead to recurrence. As a result, the potential of kinases to evolve in response to the selective pressure caused by drug therapy presents a compelling argument for simultaneously attacking many critical targets in tumor cells. Polypharmacology is defined as the design or use of pharmaceutical agents to either interact with multiple functionally related targets that act together at the same time, or to inhibit targets that are functionally different from the drug's primary target to produce additional relevant effects-thus repurposing the drug for new effects. Despite their apparent success, polypharmacological techniques face a number of obstacles. The fundamental restriction is that we only have a partial understanding of many disease pathways/mechanisms at the molecular level. Without all of the data, constructing the whole polypharmacological networks is extremely challenging. To examine the complicated data, more precise mining techniques and mapping procedures are also required. Understanding the convoluted associations, on the other hand, is a difficult process after the intricate networks have been built.

Conclusion

Polypharmacology can be used to find new drug off-target effects. This is especially crucial when it comes to predicting potential side effects of new medications in development. On the other hand, it can be utilised for drug repurposing, which identifies new indications for existing drugs/agents. This will vastly improve the current drug discovery engine, which is now stalled. Although it is still incredibly challenging at this level, polypharmacology techniques will flourish, and the rational creation of more effective but less hazardous multi-targeting drugs may emerge.