Drug design/development random

Combinatorial chemistry, a new chapter of organic synthesis, is now developing rapidly. This new approach to synthesizing large designed or random chemical libraries through application of solid phase synthetic methods, promises to revolutionize the process of drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry.24... 

In contrast to rational drug design available chemical and combinatorial libraries are randomly screened against newly designed assays for identification of suitable leads for further chemical and biological developments. Major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies routinely employ this approach in lead identification for new programs. The success of this approach depends on the size and quality of the respective chemical collections. 

Quite apart from any other obstacles which lie in the way of their being adopted, comprehensive cohort designs are unlikely to become important in drug development for the reasons that there are few circumstances in which a patient refusing randomization is likely to be faced with a choice between a drug in development and a standard therapy and, furthermore, could then be followed up. Nevertheless, such designs raise issues which are worth considering. 

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