Active pharmaceutical experimental design

These results concern the theoretical basis of chemistry. However, they are also of relevance to the application of local shape analysis and to the subsequent use of numerical local shape descriptors in correlations with various, not-well-understood experimental results, such as biochemical activities in complex biochemical systems, potency data in pharmaceutical drug design approaches, experimental toxicities in toxicological risk assessments, etc. [27-36]. 

Of course, the application of experimental design to pharmaceutical problems is not new. It has been used for the design of structure-activity relationship (SAR) compound sets, "- for optimizing synthetic processes, in analytical chemistry, and for selecting screening subsets from corporate chemical archives. This chapter focuses only on the experimental design of combi-... 

In the following example, concerning the determination of the content of active components in pharmaceutical formulations, robustness tests of HPLC methods by means of statistical experimental design (DoE) of the Plackett-Burman type are explained in more detail. 

Structure-based design is now actively pursued by sizeable groups in both academic institutions as well as in the research departments of pharmaceutical companies. Very tight collaboration with both synthetic chemists as well as with experimental biologists performing the biological assay has turned out to be a critical success factor. This often results in the dissemination of structural information to all scientists involved in the project and, ideally, the persistent use of that information in the process of inventing new active principles. 

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