Bioinformatics Accelerates the Major Tetrad: A Real Boost for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

With advanced technology and its development, bioinformatics is one of the avant-garde fields that has managed to make amazing progress in the pharmaceutical-medical field by modeling the infrastructural dimensions of healthcare and integrating computing tools in drug innovation, facilitating prevention, detection/more accurate diagnosis, and treatment of disorders, while saving time and money. By association, bioinformatics and pharmacovigilance promoted both sample analyzes and interpretation of drug side effects, also focusing on drug discovery and development (DDD), in which systems biology, a personalized approach, and drug repositioning were considered together with translational medicine. The role of bioinformatics has been highlighted in DDD, proteomics, genetics, modeling, miRNA discovery and assessment, and clinical genome sequencing. The authors have collated significant data from the most known online databases and publishers, also narrowing the diversified applications, in order to target four major areas (tetrad): DDD, anti-microbial research, genomic sequencing, and miRNA research and its significance in the management of current pandemic context. Our analysis aims to provide optimal data in the field by stratification of the information related to the published data in key sectors and to capture the attention of researchers interested in bioinformatics, a field that has succeeded in advancing the healthcare paradigm by introducing developing techniques and multiple database platforms, addressed in the manuscript.

Keywords: COVID-19; bioinformatics; microRNA; microbiology; pharmacovigilance; public health.

Figure 1

Flow chart presenting the methodology of published data selection.

Figure 2

The multiple stages of drug discovery and the events targeted in each of the discussed steps.

Figure 3

Bioinformatics in multiple assets of microbiology—proteomics, bacterial functional genomics, gene and drug discovery, siderophores, marine natural products, sequence data analysis, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) drugs, and prophylactic agents.

Figure 4

Use of bioinformatics-based tools, for alignment, validation, prediction modeling, BLAST tools, and protein sequence databases, in multiple steps of 3D homology model generation. Legend: BLAST—basic local alignment search tool; EBI—European Bioinformatics Institute; EMBL—European Molecular Biology laboratory; HMMER—biosequence analysis using profile hidden Markov models; MAFFT—Multiple Alignment using Fast Fourier Transform; MUSCLE—multiple sequence comparison by long expectation; NCBI—National Center for Biotechnology Information; Phyre 2—Protein Homology/AnalogY Recognition Engine; T-COFFEE—tree-based consistency objective function for alignment evaluation.

Figure 5

Role of bioinformatics in primary, secondary, and tertiary analysis in clinical genome sequencing, employing tools in sequence machine, alignment, calling, annotation, filtering, interpretation, and preparation of clinical reports.