Target drug discovery process

Acknowledgments Several review articles cover in much greater details numerous NMR applications that have been reported in the past years on the use of NMR spectroscopy in the drug discovery process and to monitor target-ligand interactions. The author apologizes if he was unable to mention properly all this work within the limited space of this article. 

Drug-discovery process is a highly complex, multidisciplinary and time-consuming procedure, which typically starts from the identification of appropriate drug targets (biomolecules, enzymes, ion channels, receptors) to target validation, where it was established whether the target was of relevance for the disease under study. 

The impact of the in vitro screens applied to each stage in the drug discovery process will be different. The optimal set of assays at the early stages should assess drug activity against a small number of targets that play a key role in the function of core physiological systems. 

For a DRUG DISCOVERY PROCESSES drug to work, it has to interact with a disease target in our body and... 

Even in projects with lower hit rates, carefully constructed filters should be applied, as was shown in the example of the protein-protein interaction target. Given the huge investment in HTS technology by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and the importance of the selection of actives to the drug discovery process, the scheme outlined here offers a practicable alternative to the Top X method with tangible and substantial benefits. 

---