Newdrug designwith covalent modifiers

Introduction: A major challenge for drug design is the alarming increase in drug resistance, mutations and toxicity. In recent years, covalent drugs have become a promising option to address these problems, due to their significant advantages. These advantages include their ability to target rare, non-conserved residues, shallow binding sites of target proteins and their ability to retain their binding with a receptor for a very long time.Areas covered: This review shows the increasing progress in rational design and virtual screening of covalent drugs and the promising future of accurately predicting effective covalent drugs through in silico screening.Expert opinion: All the current clinically approved covalent drugs were discovered by chance instead of systematic design. There is a promising and commendable effort towards high-throughput screening and the accurate discovery of new covalent inhibitors, which may address the problems of drug resistance and mutation. However, despite the current progression, there is still a need for more rational attention to improve the covalent warhead for improved receptor interaction and selectivity.