Drug Discovery Guide

A short guide to Drug Discovery

The aim of the DDC is to translate discoveries made in the laboratory into bedside therapies.  Drug discovery is the hunt for novel or better agents for tackling human diseases. This is a short guide to the many steps involved in discovering a new drug, which typically takes between 10 and 15 years from idea to clinic and begins with setting up a target hypothesis. Each of these steps on this pathway will interact with others further along, so several cycles of target driven discovery may be required to generate a compound that can be considered to be a lead; and developing this into a drug takes an average of 12 years.