A Note on Technology for Drug Discovery

Received: 22-Jan-2021 Published: 29-Jan-2021

Editorial

Over the past 100 years, medicines discovered by the pharmaceutical industry have significantly altered medical practice and impacted on many facets of our society. Drug development has been a target-and mechanism-agnostic technique for many years, focused on ethnobotanical information often fueled by serendipity.

Drug research has now largely evolved into a hypothesis-driven target-oriented approach with the advent of modern molecular biology methods and based on knowledge of the human genome, a development that was paralleled by major environmental changes in the pharmaceutical industry.

Today, academia, regulatory authorities, and the pharmaceutical industry all contribute to drug research, and pharmaceutical companies need to provide a critical mass of outstanding scientists employed in many clinical areas, disciplines, and innovations in order to transform fundamental science into new medical therapies for unmet medical needs.

In order to capture technical and biological synergies, laboratories have become increasingly computerized and automated, and geographically scattered testing sites are now more and more concentrated into large centers.

The need for the pharmaceutical industry to discover breakthrough drugs is matched by the the number of first-in-class drugs approved in recent years and represents the influence of modern methods, innovations, and genomics for drug discovery.