Drug discovery pathway and challenges involved in the process
What is Drug Discovery? A drug is any chemical that has therapeutic effects on the recipient. And Drug Discovery is a process by which new drugs are invented and brought to medical practice. A wide variety of strategies are adopted by the pharmaceutical industry to identify new drug products. New drugs are discovered either by serendipity or by applying various experimentation and optimization techniques. Drug discovery in the past often resulted from serendipitous observations of the effects of plant extracts or individual chemicals on animals or humans. The present-day approach relies more on high-throughput screening of libraries containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of compounds to their whether they can interact with a specific molecular target or elicit a specific biological response. The whole process of drug discovery involves: [1] screening of a wide range of biological materials to knowledge-based drug design Then in preclinical trials, potential candidat