Drug discovery pharmaceutical

Pamphlet Re-inventing Drug Discovery , Pharmaceutical Medical Products Executive Briefing, published by Anderson Consulting UK, 1996. 

This chapter began with a survey of the modem methods of drug discovery. Pharmaceutical physicians should be aware of some of the techniques employed and the rapid rate at which genetic information is becoming available. It should be noted that this modem revolution has not quite completely swept away the occasional new dmg found by serendipity or astute clinical observation. 

HuUcower, K.I. and Herber, R.L. 2011. Cell migration and invasion assays as tools for drug discovery. Pharmaceutics, 3 107-124. 

In general, there are three milestones for the drug discovery process. The first is the identification of a verified hit series (primary activity in a related series of molecules), the second the determination of a lead series (series with primary activity and drug-like properties), and the third a clinical candidate (activity, positive pharmaceutical, and pharmacokinetic properties devoid of toxicity). An example... 

The drug discovery process can be divided into four subsets acquisition of chemical drug candidates, pharmacodynamic testing of large numbers of compounds (screening), and the optimization of pharmacokinetic and pharmaceutical properties. 

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... 

The foundation for the more rational approach to drug discovery that is practised today comes from basic research into disease processes and medical conditions. Much of this research is carried out in universities and other research institutions, with funding coming from both government and pharmaceutical industry sponsors. 

Owing to the personal interest and experience of the authors, the emphasis in this chapter is on using computers for drug discovery. But the use of computers in laboratory instruments and for analysis of experimental and clinical data is no less important. This chapter is written with young scientists in mind. We feel it is important that the new investigator have an appreciation of how the field evolved to its present circumstance, if for no other reason than to help steer toward a better future for those scientists using or planning to use computers in the pharmaceutical industry. 

Also in the 1980s, structure-based drug design (SBDD) underwent a similar cycle. Early proponents oversold what could be achieved through SBDD, thereby causing pharmaceutical companies to reconsider their investments when they discovered that SBDD too was no panacea for filling the drug discovery cornucopia with choice molecules for development. Nevertheless, SBDD was an important advance. 

The 1990s was a decade of fruition because the computer-based drug discovery work of the 1980s yielded an impressive number of new chemical entities reaching the pharmaceutical marketplace. We elaborate on this statement later in this section, but first we complete the story about supercomputers in the pharmaceutical industry. 

As the twentieth century came to a close, the job market for computational chemists had recovered from the 1992-1994 debacle. In fact, demand for computational chemists leaped to new highs each year in the second half of the 1990s [135]. Most of the new jobs were in industry, and most of these industrial jobs were at pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical companies. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, in 1960 there were essentially no computational chemists in industry. But 40 years later, perhaps well over half of all computational chemists were working in pharmaceutical laboratories. The outlook for computational chemistry is therefore very much linked to the health of the pharmaceutical industry itself. Forces that adversely affect pharmaceutical companies will have a negative effect on the scientists who work there as well as at auxiliary companies such as software vendors that develop programs and databases for use in drug discovery and development. 

Schmid EF, Smith DA. Is declining innovation in the pharmaceutical industry a myth Drug Discovery Today 2005 10 1031-9. 

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