It’s a lot of work, folks. To discover effective and safe medicines using only the finite elements of the earth, and the infinite ways one can combine them, is an eternal horserace—as collaborative as it is competitive—between money and brainpower.
The push for COVID vaccines has made this horserace more public than perhaps it has ever been. The development of a new compound typically requires vast knowledge and large investments in time and capital to translate scientific discovery into a novel drug.
The growing field of drug discovery and development is enabling researchers to focus on discovering essential lead compounds for different forms of cancer and other diseases. Globally, research institutes and biopharmaceutical companies are exploring several molecular and biochemical aspects to develop mechanistic approaches for drug discovery. Various technologies, such as high-throughput screening, proteomics and genomics, including quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), next-generation sequencing (NGS) and many others, are being widely used for cellular analysis.
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