Drug Discovery

Finding a new drug for a particular disease entails three stages:

Stage 1: lead discovery
Stage 2: lead development
Stage 3: clinical trials.

The process is extremely expensive, typically costs hundreds of millions of dollars per drug candidate, and often takes seven to 10 years to occur. A substantial portion of this time involves synthesis and analysis of many derivatives of the original leads.

The Center for Chemical Diversity concentrates on developing methods to improve the first two stages of drug development and on the use of those techniques for fundamental biological research.

The first phase of drug discovery is discovery of a lead compound, a molecule that affects biological function by binding to a target protein or nucleic acid in a way that is useful for treatment of disease. For example, this compound might be a small molecule that binds to a functional protein in a microorganism causing the death of that microorganism. Historically, discovery of lead compounds entailed screening collections of natural products, e.g., from plants, marine animals, and microorganisms. Companies also screen their internal collections of all compounds made by the company over time. It is impossible to predict if or when a new lead will result from this process.

Whenever the structure of a target protein or nucleic acid is available, computational techniques, often together with structural studies can yield lead compounds. Sometimes the function of the target will suggest compounds that turn out to be leads. However, no matter what the technique, at some point in discovery of a lead compound or in further development, numerous analogs of prospective leads will need to be synthesized and assayed.

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