Exploring the Interactions of Biologically Active Compounds (Including Drugs) with Biomolecules: Utilizing Surface Plasmon Resonance and SwitchSense Techniques

An important aspect of the search for new drugs is an approach that identifies a specific molecular target involved in the disease process and develops an agent that interacts with that target to modulate its activity. Identification and validation of molecular targets is a key step in the process of designing new pharmaceuticals. Determining the strength and mode of binding a compound to a biomolecule, and thus understanding its mechanism of action, is therefore crucial. Whether a compound is a good candidate to display the expected activity against a molecular target can be preliminarily determined in the chemistry laboratory using instrumental analysis methods. The following work presents the currently used selected analysis methods for this purpose, focusing mainly on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and the switchSense technique. In addition, Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC), and Microscale Thermophoresis (MST) were presented and shortly discussed as alternative instrumental methods to study these phenomena.