Quick Discovery
Patients and Public
Our goal is to deliver new medicines for people. The process of making new medicines is a long and expensive journey. It needs expertise from a huge range of scientists and organisations. There are many steps, and each one has a high risk of failure.
Scientific research continually unearths new discoveries about how diseases work. Our mission is to translate these newly discovered biological processes into potential medicines. We refer to these as ‘compounds’ at this stage.
The drug discovery process itself begins with a search for a chemical starting point. This is a molecule that has some effect on the potential drug target identified by disease researchers.
- The drug molecule is often a small chemical compound
- The target is usually a protein in a human or disease-causing organism cell. This protein, and the work it does, are essential for the cell to live.
The most common method for finding this starting point is called ‘diversity-screening’. In the DDU, we are able to do this very quickly, with many compounds. We refer to this as ‘high-throughput screening’. We incubate our disease cells with hundreds of thousands of different chemical compounds. If the compounds affect the disease cells, we investigate further to find out if it has bound to our target. We call this a ‘hit’, and take the hit compounds on for further study.
Ironically, the term 'drug discovery' is something of a misnomer. After the initial stage of identifying hits, we become more akin to engineers than treasure hunters. We make new compounds that have never been made before. It is not enough for a given compound to affect the target in the desired way. To be successful as a drug, we need to ensure many things. A good medicine must:
- get into a person’s body (say, in a pill), and reach the correct organ or tissue.
- remain there at the needed concentration long enough to do its work
- be flushed from the body without toxic effects.
With so many challenges to confront researchers must design and create, rather than find, the right compound.