  Drug development is a wide scientific field that faces many challenges these
days. Among them are extremely high development costs, long development times,
as well as a low number of new drugs that are approved each year. To solve
these problems, new and innovate technologies are needed that make the drug
discovery process of small-molecules more time and cost-efficient, and which
allow to target previously undruggable target classes such as protein-protein
interactions. Structure-based virtual screenings have become a leading
contender in this context. In this review, we give an introduction to the
foundations of structure-based virtual screenings, and survey their progress in
the past few years. We outline key principles, recent success stories, new
methods, available software, and promising future research directions. Virtual
screenings have an enormous potential for the development of new small-molecule
drugs, and are already starting to transform early-stage drug discovery.
