Drug discovery basics
How a medicine gets from an idea to a clinical candidate: targets, hits, leads, screening and the size of chemical space.
What is drug discovery?
Drug discovery is the process of finding a molecule that changes a disease-relevant biological target safely enough to be tested in people.
What are hits, leads and clinical candidates?
A hit shows activity in a screen, a lead is a confirmed and improvable chemical series, and a clinical candidate is the single optimized compound taken into human trials.
What is virtual screening?
Virtual screening uses computers to rank large compound libraries so that only the most promising molecules are bought, made or tested.
What is chemical space?
Chemical space is the set of all possible molecules; the drug-like part alone is estimated at around 10^60 compounds, far more than can ever be made.
Put it into practice
Screen, dock and order compounds in one place
Pyxis Discovery combines macrocycle and small-molecule libraries with similarity search, docking and structure prediction in the browser.