A Decade of Indonesian Atmosphere in Computer-Aided Drug Design

The era of drug design aided by computers has been very welcome to Indonesian researchers working on drug discovery and its related fields. The availability of software, bioinformatics, and cheminformatics data that are free and friendly to use increases the interest in carrying the software, bioinformatics, and cheminformatics out in drug discovery projects. The computational method is believed to speed up the discovery of new drugs, because the computational method can predict the molecular behavior of chemical compounds to interact with biological systems. Therefore, the real experimental study cost should be minimized, since there are a few promising molecules for a drug in silico only that would be investigated further. This article describes a decade of research concerning drug design and discovery aided by computers in Indonesia from 2011 to 2020. A number of computer-aided drug design-related articles (CADDs) from Indonesian journals were collected during the decade, and their trend was analyzed. The results show that there was an increasing trend in the use of CADD programs by Indonesian researchers during those ten years. The most common methods being used were docking and molecular dynamics with AutoDock/AutoDock Vina and AMBER/GROMACS, respectively. In addition, the most common protein targets, ligand structures, and disease targets being studied were human estrogen receptor alpha (HERa), flavonoids, and cancer.