Overview of Rational Drug Design
M. Rami Reddy, Abby L. Parrill · ACS symposium series · 1999
Traditional Drug Design. Drug discovery programs in the pharmaceutical industry prior to the 1960's were based entirely on screening thousands of natural and synthetic compounds for activity. Once a potential drug compound was selected by this process, medicinal chemists would then synthesize hundreds of related compounds to develop the safest, most effective drug for patients use. However, the costs and risks associated with this process have become enormous; the cost of completing the research and development process for a single new drug has more than doubled in the last decade. Various sources estimate this cost to to be anywhere from $200-$500 million. Each year researchers test hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds, yet in the United States only about 25 new drugs are introduced. Even worldwide the introduction of new drugs only reaches 40-45 per year. Many of these new drugs are only "me-too compounds", as the various companies attempt