Top Ten Most Popular Drug Hunter Resources of 2023

The educational and professional resources on Drug Hunter are meant to help you with your job on a regular basis. Here are the ten most popular resource pages on Drug Hunter in 2023 - if you haven’t found and used these already, check them out!

1. Practical PK Calculators - Who doesn't find themselves periodically scratching their heads at the units other scientists choose to report their data in? Drug Hunter's practical PK calculators are useful for day-to-day drug discovery and include a PK unit converter for conversions like µM to ng/mL, an animal study requirement calculator for determining how much material to synthesize in preparation for animal studies, and a simple human equivalent dose estimator. 

2. PK Cheat Sheet - When interpreting compound PK data, it's helpful to have reference values to compare experimental data to. This article contains a PK reference table with common cross-species physiological parameters relevant to PK, including animal size, liver blood flow, kidney blood flow, and body volumes.

3. How to Get Drugs Into the Brain - Obtaining adequate drug exposure in the brain is key to treating CNS diseases effectively. In this article, Dennis Koester sums up some key points on how to find compounds that cross the blood-brain barrier.

4. Drug Target Identification Methods After a Phenotypic Screen - In this minireview, put together with Pelago Bioscience, we summarize available methods for identifying a drug’s target when it is not known at the outset. This article focuses on target deconvolution methods used in industry, the strengths and limitations of those commonly used methods, and the utility of label-free methods like CETSA® for probeless target deconvolution.

5. Why pKas Matter in Medicinal Chemistry and a Drug Discovery Amine pKa Table - In this article, put together with pKa measurement provider Analiza, we highlight the importance of pKa values in medicinal chemistry and drug discovery and provide reference posters of pKa values of common amines’ conjugate bases. 

6. Why LogD Matters / ΔLogD Cheat Sheet - This article explains what LogD is, why LogD (or LogP) is important in drug discovery, and rookie mistakes in drug discovery that come from overlooking LogD or LogP. In addition, the article contains a LogD reference poster that shows the estimated amount of potency attributable to lipophilicity considerations alone.

7. Phase I Drug Metabolism - This article, put together with metabolism experts at Hypha Discovery, explains what Phase I drug metabolism is, contains a poster summarizing common enzyme-mediated drug metabolism reactions, and provides interesting examples of phase I biotransformations and their impact on drug pharmacology.

8. Drug Discovery CROs - This page provides a list of curated industry service providers (contract research organizations) that provide outsourced contract drug discovery services of particular interest to drug discovery professionals working at biotechs or pharmaceutical companies. The table lists drug discovery CROs specializing in a variety of fields, such as chemistry, solid form development, physicochemical property measurement, and protein purification and protein crystallization.

9. What Makes a Drug Best-in-Class - It’s best to be first, but drugs that are approved later with the same mechanism of action can also create significant value for patients and society by being best-in-class (BIC), or what clinicians refer to as “gold standard.” This article explains what properties can make a follow-on drug best-in-class (BIC) and provides historical examples across therapeutic indications where a best-in-class strategy was employed.

10. Topliss Cheat Sheets - Imagine you’re on a new project that has just conducted a chemical screen on a novel target, and you want to develop structure-activity relationships (SAR) on these early hits, but don’t have time to make 100 compounds before the next project review meeting. This article from Christian Kuttruff contains print-outs of the classic Topliss tree and Topliss batchwise operational scheme for analog synthesis to help you with your SAR development.

Check out the Educational Resources section for more!