Introduction to Drug Discovery
A. K. Ganguly, Sesha Sridevi Alluri · 2021
This chapter describes the drug discovery process of advancing an initial lead to the approval process by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Sources of drug discovery, including natural products, medicinal chemistry, and libraries of compounds on file in pharmaceutical industries and biotechnology, have been outlined. Structure-based drug discovery, pharmacokinetics, and drug metabolism are discussed in detail. A brief summary of the structure of DNA, transcription to RNA, and translation to proteins using triplet code is presented. Chemical synthesis of purines, pyrimidines, nucleosides, and nucleotides is presented in the context of drug discovery, such as AZT.