Bioinformatics plays an important role in drug discovery and development by enabling target identification, rational drug design, compound refinement, and other processes. Key applications of bioinformatics include virtual screening of large compound libraries to identify potential drug leads, homology modeling of protein structures to inform drug design, and similarity searches to find analogs of existing drug molecules. The overall drug development process involves studying the disease, identifying drug targets, designing compounds, testing and refining candidates, and conducting clinical trials. Computational techniques expedite many steps but experimental validation is still needed.