Strategies of drug development

Note that these distinctions are not really sharp in practice. E.g., the development of H -receptor blockers described above would be a mixture of strategies 1 and 2. In reality, one will always try to rationally make use of as much information as possible and then play some kind of lottery to do the rest. 

An example of the rational approach to drug design is provided by the development of HIV (human immune deficiency virus) protease inhibitors. HIV protease cleaves viral polyproteins - the initial products of translation - into the individual protein components and thus is essential for 

The brute-force approach involves the following steps  

Systematically test every new (or old) compound for drug activity in all kinds of drug activity assays - no matter which purpose it was designed for 

A classic success case of the brute-force approach is the discovery of Prontosil rubrum , the first sulfonamide type 

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