Molecular Modeling of Histamine Receptors—Recent Advances in Drug Discovery

Abstract

The recent developments of fast reliable docking, virtual screening and other algorithms gave rise to discovery of many novel ligands of histamine receptors that could be used for treatment of allergic inflammatory disorders, central nervous system pathologies, pain, cancer and obesity. Furthermore, the pharmacological profiles of ligands clearly indicate that these receptors may be considered as targets not only for selective but also for multi-target drugs that could be used for treatment of complex disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore, analysis of protein-ligand recognition in the binding site of histamine receptors and also other molecular targets has become a valuable tool in drug design toolkit. This review covers the period 2014–2020 in the field of theoretical investigations of histamine receptors mostly based on molecular modeling as well as the experimental characterization of novel ligands of these receptors.

Keywords

• histamine receptors
• G protein-coupled receptors
• computational studies
• molecular docking
• virtual screening
• drug discovery and design