Can we rationally design promiscuous drugs?

Structure-based drug design is now used widely in modern medicinal chemistry. The application of structural biology to medicinal chemistry has heralded the ‘rational drug design’ vision of discovering exquisitely selective ligands. However, recent advances in post-genomic biology are indicating that polypharmacology may be a necessary trait for the efficacy of many drugs, therefore questioning the ‘one drug, one target’ assumption of current rational drug design. By combining advances in chemoinformatics and structural biology, it might be possible to rationally design the next generation of promiscuous drugs with polypharmacology.