pharmaceutical discovery techniques

[scott25]

I'm not sure if i have posted this in the right section but here goes...

I'm doing a project on rhodopsin which in part requires me to explain how the structural and functional aspects can be used for developing or discovering new pharmaceutical products.
i have found loads of stuff on structure based approaches such as homology modeling and ligand structure based approaches but i can never find any information on how the function of this GPCR could be used to identify new drugs for other GPCRs. To be honest i dont see how it could be, i understand how similarities between the structure of related proteins can be used to create computer models to test and identify new drugs on but the function is very specific, i.e. it transduces light into a signal - how could that possibly help with other GPCRs. the only thing i can think of is the perhaps the mechanism behind the function, i.e how it becomes activated and using this knowlege to see if a drug has activated (or deactivated) the protein in high throughput screening. Do you think that is along the lines of a function based approach? on the net there doesnt seem to be such a thing as function based drug discovery though.

would appreciated any insights,
thanks

[mith]

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o ... 713c9da87b

[scott25]

thanks for the reply, but from what i can tell from the abstract of that article is that it is a study outlining the difficulties in modelling a CCK receptor through homology techniques which is still a structure based approach.

I basically want to know if there is such a thing as a functional based approach in drug discovery and what those techniques might be...