Talk:Drug discovery

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The link "Chemical Suppliers" points to a site, which in my point of view just lists products of the following compnanies: exchemistry and aurora. Try to search benzene as substructure search. Very uggly. These companies are also mentioned at #1 and #2 in the directory.

Could you please remove this link?

All spam links removed. ~K 20:06, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Link suggestion

Is this link acceptable for this article (link-owner, newbie, self-promotion)?

Drug discovery and development - extensive overview, but in context of project

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/pvosta/hcpphrm.htm

Pvosta 08:43, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Please add definition of "therapeutic target"!

Please keep in mind that most reading this do not have even the basic domain-specific terminology down, or they would not be reading such a wikipedia article on the topic. Take a quick read of the intro and beginning of the first section - the context in which "therapeutic target" is used does not provide sufficient clues to really know what it means here. Are the drugs the therapeutic targets? Does therapeutic target refer to genes that might play a role? To diseases one hopes to cure? Thanks --Fitzhugh 04:17, 16 March 2007 (UTC) ... ok, it becomes more clear as one reads, but it should be defined when first used. I would do it if I had a decent definition, but all I can really say is that it seems to refer to any aspect of the mechanism of a disease that might be acted on by a drug, such as a protein or a pathway. I'll let someone with a clue add a definition - please do, oh clue holding people!

Therapeutic target is SUPPOSED to mean a compound, not the gene for it, not the mechanism. But people seem to use the word target fast and loose. I am a writer currently being Forced to learn all this jargon faster than my poor brain can absorb it. Still, I am starting to get some of it and I agree that some of these pharma articles are hard to make out. If someone nags me later, I might remember to come back here and try to make this a bit more accessible.It would be even better if the original writer would take a stab at defining terms better and generally rewriting more simply. Eperotao 16:36, 5 April 2007 (UTC) BUT it is still Really nice to have these! Thanks! Eperotao 16:40, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Christophorito (talk) 10:52, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

A (therapeutic) target is NOT the drug, it is usually the direct interaction partner of a drug, be it an enzyme, a receptor, or any other protein. It could also be a mechanism if the drug does not act through binding to proteins. Сасусlе 14:54, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merger proposal

A page titled Natural Product Drug discovery has recently appeared. Much of this page is about "Naturally derived" drugs. As naturally derived, is essentially the same thing as man-made (once something has been altered by man it is not natural any more), it makes sense to merge that page into this one. The writing quality of the natural product drug discovery page should probably be improved before it is merged into this one but that page does appear to contain a fair bit of information. It seems both pages would benefit from a merger. JamesStewart7 10:28, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I disagree on this suggestion as use of natural products as starting material is not a widely used approach in drug discovery today. Thus the article entitled "Drug discovery" should give a overall view of that process, whereas this article should give an insight of this "alternative" approach and focus in the specific issues related to use of natural products as a source for new drugs. In principle, it is true that modified natural products are no longer natural in the strictest meaning, but the term natural product drug discovery includes also the process of using natural compounds as leads. Instead of merging, I suggest this article to be broadened as there are still many topics under natural product drug discovery that should be covered and that also demonstrate the diffetence of these two concepts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.251.240.116 (talk) 16:02, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

I think I'm looking for a definition of natural in the "Natural product drug discovery" article. Does natural mean plant sources, animal sources, chemicals commonly occuring in nature, chemicals rarely occuring in nature, chemicals commonly occuring but can be made in the lab for a lower cost? You could perhaps avoid the merger by making the natural product article focus purely on the first two (plant and animal source) while making the drug discovery article focus on everything else. The real problem with the page is almost any chemical is a natural product in the strictest sense. Thus, the page should be altered to avoid the use of the word natural eg. if it's plant source just say plant source. The reason I suggested the merger, however, is that after the first step (finding the substance and structural elucidation) the plant derived drug should really go through basically the same process. The active ingredient gets removed at I would assume it is put through the same screening tests as any other substance. Then it definately gets put through the same clincal trials. The similarity between the majority of these processes is the reason I suggested the merger.

There may, however, be another reason to keep the articles seperate. Does "alternative" refer to alternative in the sense of "alternative medicine" or in the sense of another scientific process. The natural product drug discovery page at least attempts to appear scientific so I have been approaching it through this viewpoint. If, however, an alternative medicine stance is taken the process of screening and testing is likely to be widely different. I would suggest we go one of two ways. Label the natural product drug discovery as alternative medicine and discuss, say the processes that herbalists use to pick a product or keep it within the realm of pharmaceuticals, drop the word natural and add a plant derived section to the drug discovery page. So really everything hedges on how natural and alternative are defined. JamesStewart7 01:49, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with a merger. Today natural products drug discovery is endangered due to the DIFFERENCES between drug discovery from natural products and drug discovery from small molecules. This difference should be emphasized with two distinct articles. (paxillus 24 November 2007)

I would strongly agree with a merger. There are few, if any, practitioners in the drug discovery enterprise who would make operational distinction between natural products (NPs) and medicinal chemistry cpds (MCCs). Its true the emphasis on NPs waxes and wanes over the years. However, there is an increasing join-up in contempory cheinformatics and computational chemistry that will bring them back into the fold. To take an obvious example, NPs, MCCs are now joined by metabolomics (that includes endogenous ligands) and chemical genomics at the compound structure level in PubChem, ChemSpider ect. Sure, the word natural, like organic can no longer be usefuly defined. I would propose a simple definition that NPs, as distinct and definable chemical structures, are derived from the metabolic activity of any organism. Most would primarily be biosynthetic but clearly biologicaly-derived catabolites are "in" and together they overlap with the "metabolome" (aguably to 100%?).I see no virtue of leaving chemical degradation and transformation out, so coal, oil and wine stay in. If oil then paint and plastics? I see the defintion problem but we can set limits defined by the pragmatism of professional drug hunters who, while they screen most things such as sea-slug or frog skin extracts, probably won't run HTS on fractionated paints-just yet....But, less flipantantly, if a chemically defined paint componant was in ChemSpider and happened to have a substrucutre or superstructure match with, say an MCC that was very active in a PubChem screen, you can bet the chemist would order it.