Protein-protein interactions as targets for small molecule drug discovery.

Protein-protein interactions represent a highly populated class of targets for drug discovery. However, such systems present a number of unique challenges. This review presents an analysis of individual protein-protein interaction systems which have recently yielded success in discovering drug-like inhibitors. The structural characteristics of the protein binding sites and the attributes of the small molecule ligands are focused upon, in an attempt to derive commonly shared principles that may be of general usefulness in future drug discovery efforts within this target class. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.