ABSTRACT
140Mosquito-borne diseases have an overwhelming impact on public health throughout the world. Tropical and subtropical countries are most affected by these diseases. The mosquito-borne diseases include malaria, dengue fever virus, Rift Valley fever virus, yellow fever, chikungunya virus, West Nile virus, lymphatic filariasis, Zika virus, and Japanese encephalitis. Despite several efforts by the WHO and the Gates Foundation to combat and eradicate these diseases, they still remain a big problem to the tropical world. Although mosquito repellents are effective and still good countermeasures against these infections, the repellents have several issues, including resistance and toxicity to limit their use. Thus, therapeutic interventions are necessary both for prophylactics and treatments from these infections. However, despite access to many available drugs for treatment, growing resistance to most of them has raised serious concerns and requires new countermeasures. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the usefulness of in silico pharmacophore modeling as a tool for identification and design of new compounds for developing potential therapeutic agents against mosquito-borne diseases. The chapter will discuss earlier efforts of in silico research in this area through a comprehensive search of literature including efforts made in the author’s own laboratory. The pharmacophore modeling presented here will be based on various computational strategies used for organizing molecular features to account for activity of potential therapeutics against these diseases. In addition, the chapter will illustrate how the models can be used as templates for virtual screening of compound databases and identify potential new candidates to counter the mosquito-borne diseases.
