Medicinal chemists are having to come up with ingenious ways to improve the potency, efficacy, solubility and metabolism of new drug candidates. Dr Sarah Houlton describes some of the processes being adopted.
New drugs rarely just ‘happen’ – they are invariably the result of painstaking work by medicinal chemists. They take an initial lead compound and improve its potency, efficacy, and properties such as solubility and metabolism, to create a molecule that works well while having as few side-effects as possible. This process involves a lot of systematic design work, and the molecules then have to be synthesised so they can be tested.
Several drug discovery stories were shared at the Advances in Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry conference, held in St Petersburg, Russia in August.
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