Current Progress in Drug Discovery and Development

Drug discovery is a significant part of medicine, pharmacology and biotechnology, which is concerned with the discovery of new and improved drugs. The process involves high-throughput screening (HTS), which refers to the testing of chemicals for their ability to modify the target. Other methods of drug discovery include de novo drug design, fragment-based lead discovery and protein-directed dynamic combinatorial chemistry. Drug development is the process of launching new drugs into the market after the lead compounds are identified during the drug discovery process. This stage involves two processes namely, pre-clinical development and clinical phase. Drug development ensures that all parameters of safety, pharmacokinetics, metabolism and toxicity of the new drug are analyzed prior to clinical trials. This book presents researches and studies performed by experts across the globe in the fields of drug discovery and drug development. A number of latest researches have been included to keep the readers up-to-date with the global concepts in these areas of study.