Objective

An academic entrepreneur’s view of Drug discovery in a world of biological and chemical complexity The death of biological reductionism…long live complexity!!! Well, not quite but there is a significant element of this emerging which is progressively altering the Drug discovery landscape. The prevailing paradigm of reducing complex biology down to targets has, in the main, failed to make a profound impact on the treatment of complex diseases. If that is not enough, the view that one can target drugs precisely to a single target without affecting other targets in a meaningful way has, in my view collapsed. Much to the dismay of conventional medicinal chemistry, this truism has been shown to be highly inaccurate. So….where do we go from here? Thankfully, the new tools of informatics and biology offer hope for a profound transformation of the drug discovery landscape and the emergence of a new paradigm that enables the incorporation of complexity and drug promiscuity. Much remains to be achieved but significant progress has been made. This talk will review some of the novel workflow elements that have emerged in the past 10 years that presage the establishment of such a novel paradigm and discuss what such a brave new world might look like.