Drug discovery

Drug discovery is the process through which new medication candidates are discovered. Drug discovery is a combination of processes that operate at the intersection of the fields of chemistry, pharmacology, biotechnology and medicine.

Historically, medicines were either discovered accidentally, like penicillin, or by identifying the active ingredients of traditional remedies (aspirin from tree bark, or morphine from opium poppies).

These days there are multiple approaches to drug discovery:

• Chemical libraries: libraries of small synthetic chemical compounds or natural products that can be screened quickly in cells or organisms to identify compounds that trigger the desired biological effect. This process is known as Pharmacology.
• Medicinal chemistry: uses synthetic organic chemistry to create new compounds or modify existing ones to increase the potency and selectivity of potential drug candidates.
• Structure-activity studies: these studies look at the relationship between chemical structure and its biological activity against the target. This might use existing chemical libraries for screening or use computer-aided drug design to run algorithms to predict the chemical and physical interactions of the compound in the target receptor.

Once a suitable compound has been found, the process of drug development can continue, including scale up, medicine formulation and clinical trials.