11. Drug discovery Flashcards
what happens to most drugs in development?
they fail and never make it to being treatments
what is a hit?
A compound with confirmed activity against the desired target
what is a lead?
An active compound with drug-like and some favourable pharmacological properties
what is a candidate?
an optimised lead ready for clinical development
What is pharmacokinetics?
how the body interacts with administered substances for the entire duration of exposure
- the effect of host on the drug
what is pharmacodynamics?
molecular, biochemical and physiological effects or actions of the drug
- the effect of the drug on the host
Overview of drug discovery process
- a large number of molecules need to be explored to find 1 drug
- most time is spent in the discovery phase
- can take decades
- a lot of risk and investment is needed for clinical phase
why do drugs fail in clinical trials?
- lack of efficacy in the patient. It is when the drug just doesn’t work well. Accounts for 40-50% of failure
- Unmanageable toxicity and side effects. Accounts for 30% of failure
- Poor drug-like reasons like it being metabolised too fast. accounts for 10-15% of failure
- Economic reasons. Just costs too much. accounts for 10% of failure
what is phenotypic based drug discovery?
- disease model
- phenotypic assay
- lead identification - will it kill the bacteria?, don’t always need to know how it works?
- target identification
- lead optimisation
- preclinical trials
- Clinical trials
what is target-based drug discovery?
- know the drug target
- target based assay to find a phenotypic effect
- lead identification
- lead optimisation
- preclinical trials
- clinical trials
what makes a good drug target?
- disease modifying
- druggable
- assayable
- differentially expressed
- low liability to resistance
- vulnerable
- favourable intellectual property situation
what is meant by disease modifying?
doing something to effect the progression or outcome of the disease
what is meant by druggable?
its activity can be modulated by a drug so normally small molecules or proteins not multicomplex proteins
what is meant by assayable?
can use in high through put screening to screening 1000s of molecules
what is meant by differentially expressed?
different in the normal state vs the diseased state