Drug Discovery

Drug Discovery, also known as drug research, is mainly to discover and develop new drugs. These drugs have different modes of action from approved drugs and are intended to be used for clinical indications that have not been resolved by approved drugs. The development of new drugs from initial ideas to the launch of a finished product is a complex process that may take 12 to 15 years and cost over $1 billion. The process of drug discovery is shown in Figure 1, which mainly includes target confirmation, compound screening, preclinical development, clinical development and FDA filing.

Figure 1. Drug Discovery Process^[1]

The discovery of Imatinib (HY-15463; https://www.medchemexpress.eu/Imatinib.html) conforms to the typical drug discovery process. Imatinib is the first tumor-targeting drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). In the whole screening process, the Lead compound was first screened from a large number of compound libraries by high-throughput screening. After a series of modifications and optimization, a candidate compound Imatinib with good physical and chemical properties and biological characteristics was finally formed. After successfully passing various clinical trials, it was approved for marketing by FDA in 2001.

There are two main reasons for drug failure in clinical practice: the drug does not work or the safety of the drug is low. Therefore, the identification and validation of targets has become one of the most important steps in drug discovery. An excellent drug action target needs to be both effective and safe, meet clinical and commercial needs, and most importantly, have "producibility".

The process of high-throughput screening (HTS) is the screening of small molecules that can become drugs from a large number of compounds. HTS can detect thousands to millions of samples at the same time, and verify the biological activity of compounds at the biological model, cell level, or molecular level.

MedChemExpress (MCE) can provide more than 100 ready-to-use active compound libraries, such as Bioactive Compound Library (HY-L001), Drug Repurposing Compound Library (HY-L035), Natural Product Library (HY-L021), FDA-Approved Drug Library (HY-L022), Traditional Chinese Medicine Monomer Compound Library (HY-L065), etc. A total of 20,000+ small molecule compounds with biological activity can be used for HTS and high-intensity screening (HCS). It is a professional tool for conducting research on drug screening and new indications discovery.