Therefore, the speed with which a company passes through the various stages of the drug discovery process is critical to success. The pharmaceutical industry is constantly looking for new ways to reduce drug discovery time by identifying new targets and novel drugs to make the entire process more efficient and cost-effective.
Combinatorial chemistry is one area in which tremendous advances are taking place.
One of the important stages of drug discovery is the screening, characterization, and validation of potential lead compounds. The process begins with lead generation and the design of huge libraries of compounds, whose chemical structures may interact with a target receptor and exert a desired biological effect. When a compound successfully passes through HTS, it is considered a lead candidate and then progresses through characterization and validation studies known as lead optimization. Lead optimization is the fine-tuning of drug candidates for maximum effectiveness and minimum toxicity. The roles of synthetic and computational chemists are interwoven in the process of lead generation and lead optimization.