Drug discovery and development is a highly complex, time-consuming process, which entails spending millions of dollars per drug to bring to market. The application of knowledge from chemistry, along with trial-and-error–based pharmacology, has traditionally been the drug development technique of choice. This approach makes the process very cumbersome. However, the pharmaceutical industry has recently been investing in the development and use of an unprecedented wealth of publically available ‘omics’ data, with a quest to develop drugs that are more effective, safe, curative and that can accelerate the process of screening and drug development. Applied informatics and bioinformatics are imperative in the development of high-throughput screening techniques, rational drug design and drug target identification. Moreover, the analysis of genomic data for various mutations and SNPs can be used in predicting the therapy response in a patient and can be equally useful in making treatment decisions at the clinic.

Another exciting area of research in pharmacology includes the use of natural sources such as culinary herb and/or other plant sources. Although plant compounds have been widely used as antifungal and antibacterial agents in China and many Asian countries, the knowledge relating to the mechanism of action of these natural compounds is limiting. Applied informatics is expected to be highly instrumental in the identification of common fragments between various drug compounds and phytochemicals.

The knowledge of metabolic and biosynthetic pathways relating to phytochemicals could augment drug production strategies using plant sources. Since rational drug development and biosynthesis are highly data driven, the development of open source data platforms and public repositories for biomedical literature, clinical studies, biological pathways, and toxicological profile and drug databases are crucial for the advancements in pharmacology and pharmacogenomics. Therefore, the main goal of the AIPP workshop is to provide a common platform for scientists from various multidisciplinary fields, including applied informatics, bioinformatics, pharmacologists, biomedicine, health informatics, and plant biologists, to exchange novel and innovative ideas. The workshop is expected to provide the opportunity to share research findings for efficient and effective ways of integrating life science data using applied informatics and for developing robust tools and insightful databases to facilitate the discovery of new knowledge in pharmacology and biomedicine.