Compounds that show strong signals (hits) are further characterized and chemically modified in the hope of finding lead candidates safe and effective enough in animal studies to warrant human clinical trials. If any industry is ripe for transformation, it is pharmaceuticals.įor decades, identifying potential drug candidates has been an automated, robotics-driven trial-and-error approach called high-throughput screening (HTS). HTS tests a disease-causing protein against pre-synthesized drug-like compounds stored in a chemical library, by detecting an experimental signal that correlates with binding activity. More and more FDA approvals are for repurposed or copycat “me-too” drugs that do little to improve treatment of various diseases. Pharmaceutical companies compensate for this growing inefficiency by raising drug prices and in-licensing promising drugs from smaller companies at earlier stages of development to pack their drug pipelines. ROI on ‘Big Pharma’ R&D is now trending near the cost of capital and expected to decline further. It’s a high risk, high reward competition, and for every success there are dozens of failures. The typical small-molecule drug that can be administered as a pill takes 10-12 years to reach market and billions of dollars in development costs, with odds of success per program ranging from 1 in 20 to 1 in 50, depending on the therapeutic area. Designing these new drug molecules is a nanoscale scientific and technological challenge. Drug discovery at its core is a problem of finding novel molecules that bind to disease-causing proteins in our bodies, be they our own proteins or those of a viral or bacterial invader.

Nano discovery inc