DILI is a leading cause of acute liver failure, accounting for half of these cases and often resulting in drug withdrawals. Understanding and managing DILI risk as a medicinal chemist involves exploring the intricate interplay among properties and structural features. In this article, we provide a medicinal chemist's perspective on the current understanding of DILI mechanisms, highlight cutting-edge assay developments for a holistic assessment, and discuss strategies for predicting DILI risks.

There has been substantial interest in the development of screening methods capable of surveying a wider sample of chemical space and larger numbers of compounds. Over the past two decades, DEL technology has evolved into a broadly utilized and validated platform in drug discovery, yielding diverse hits for a wide range of biologically relevant targets. Read the full review for a historical and technical overview of DEL technology, including how libraries are prepared and screened, a comparison to other HTS methods, and examples of successful applications in drug discovery.

If you are as excited as we are about this new era of non-opioid pain management and want to learn more, explore our series of articles that unravel the fascinating history of target validation of voltage-gated sodium channels, showcase the breakthroughs achieved so far, and look forward to what lies ahead for the industry.

With increasingly tight timelines between bench and clinic, considering formulation strategies early on can give your program a competitive edge. This succinct formulations guide provides specific clinically-used examples of common formulations, and can help you select a formulation strategy most likely to succeed based on the properties of your compound.

Obtaining adequate drug exposure in the brain is key to treating CNS diseases effectively. Recently, Dennis Koester gave us a crash course in CNS drug discovery in a Drug Hunter Flash Talk. Here, he sums up some key points on how to find compounds that cross the blood-brain barrier.

Here’s a common scenario - your team has just completed a phenotypic screening campaign, cleaned out the false positives through hit triage , and now you have modestly optimized validated leads with cell-based activity. The problem is, you have no idea how your compounds work, and whether they act on a target or set of targets that are worth [...]

This article explains what Phase II drug metabolism is, contains a poster summarizing common enzyme-mediated bioconjugation reactions, and provides interesting examples of Phase II transformations and their impact on drug pharmacology. "As any biotransformation scientist will know, metabolism is not a binary function, and drugs can be cleared [...]

How a Follow-on Drug Can Create Value After a First-in-Class Drug Novel drugs can make a big impact in two main ways—by being first-in-class (FIC) or by being best-in-class (BIC). A novel drug that produces its therapeutic effect by interacting with a new target or that is used to treat a new condition is considered first-in-class (FIC) [...]

Optimizing lead compounds to have drug candidate-like qualities is time-consuming and expensive. Oftentimes, critical drug discovery project questions, such as on-target pharmacology or toxicology, can be answered more efficiently with compounds that are "good enough," saving teams time and further resource investment. This article discusses [...]

In this article, we highlight the importance of p K a values in medicinal chemistry and drug discovery and provide a reference poster of p K a values of common amines’ conjugate bases. Since amines are often a part of marketed drugs, knowledge of their p K a s can provide guidance in the selection of basic moieties to match the desired [...]

In this minireview, Dr. Romyr Dominique introduces three key concepts in fragment-based drug discovery and shares his favorite articles and resources on fragment-based drug discovery. Fragment-based drug discovery has emerged as a key tool for acquiring starting points for challenging targets like KRAS. By Dr. Romyr Dominique What is FBDD, or [...]

In this minireview, Drs. Jayme L. Dahlin and Michael A. Walters summarize the different mechanisms by which molecules can be AICs (assay interference compounds), a subset of which can be flagged as PAINS (pan-assay interference compounds) by a popular set of substructure filters. They bin these into non-technology-related interference [...]

In this article, Dr. Thuy Tran , a CMC Project Leader at Servier, gives us a quick explanation of what an IND is, what a clinical hold is, and why clinical holds happen for drug discovery scientists. What is an IND? Health authorities require drug developers to provide and justify safety and efficacy information for new treatments in humans [...]

This page contains Drug Hunter's practical PK calculators useful for day-to-day drug discovery, including a PK unit converter such as for uM to ng/mL unit conversion, an animal study requirement calculator for how much material to synthesize in preparation for animal studies, and a simple human equivalent dose estimator . Who doesn't find [...]

Small-molecule drug candidates are increasingly falling “ beyond the rule of 5 ,” making oral administration more challenging. Optimizing a drug’s solid form can improve its solubility and bioavailability when further molecular modifications are prohibitive. This minireview covers solid form strategies for increasing the solubility and oral [...]

This article 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. By Drake Anthony Russell , reviewed by Dr. Dian Su and Dr. Julia Shanu-Wilson. Thanks to Hypha Discovery [...]

Reading the thoughts of industry leaders is one of the best ways to grow as a drug discovery professional. This table contains a list of some of the best drug discovery blogs and biopharma social media influencers. They're all clearly passionate about what they do and great free resources. [ninja_tables id="4145"] More background on each [...]

It's hard not to think about infectious diseases at the moment, but it's a great time to review the drug discovery literature. One area of drug discovery that has deep roots in infectious disease research is targeted covalent inhibition. Targeted covalent inhibitors form covalent bonds with discrete targets (as opposed to [...]

This article introduces the Topliss tree and Topliss schemes for analog synthesis, illustrates when they might be useful, and provides easy-to-use posters or "cheat sheets" of the original schemes. By Christian Kuttruff Why are the Topliss Tree and Topliss Schemes Useful? Imagine you’re on a new project that has just conducted a chemical [...]

This article explains what LogD is, why LogD (or LogP) is important in drug discovery, rookie mistakes in drug discovery that come from overlooking LogD or LogP, and contains a LogD reference poster that shows the estimated amount of potency attributable to lipophilicity considerations alone. By Dennis Hu Jump to Cheat Sheet Lipophilicity is [...]

This table contains a list of some of the best drug discovery journals. This list is not exhaustive (there's literally hundreds in our team RSS feed) but this is a subjective list of where to find the most useful drug discovery articles for one entering the field. Experts all have their own list based on their therapeutic area(s) and focus [...]

This table contains a list of some of the best drug discovery books and best books in related topics such as pharmacology, toxicology, pharmaceutics, and biotech in general. While nothing serves as a replacement for industry experience, a few books serve as useful references and offer glimpses into what real world drug discovery is like. We [...]

This table contains a list of some of the best drug discovery websites, online databases, and other online resources for drug hunters. If you have a suggestion that we've missed, let us know!

You’ve probably lived this story before: you’re working on your favorite kinase, YFK1, and are looking for selective inhibitors over YFK2.  The problem is, they’re virtually identical near the active site, save for a single residue sitting in the back pocket that your amazing structural biologist has identified.  The team [...]

Protein-ligand interactions are driven predominantly by strong hydrogen-bonding interactions, de-solvation energetics, and other entropic considerations including ligand lipophilicity. However, the combination of many weaker interactions can contribute to potency, and are often necessary to obtain selectivity when targets and anti-targets [...]

With the biochemistry magic available to the liver, it's a wonder that anything we consume is well-tolerated. Even carboxylic acids are structural alerts as they can be converted to bioreactive acyl glucoronides. The best we can do as drug hunters is minimize the risk of toxic metabolite formation and apply assays appropriately to select [...]

There are catalysis geniuses (looking at you, process chemists!) and then there are those of us just looking to put compounds in vials.  Here are the simplest conditions that'll get you what you want 90% of the time.  Beyond that you'll need to ask a guru like Nick White or Malcolm Huestis. Hope this table helps. Explore drughunter.co m for more.

This article contains a pharmacokinetics reference table ("PK cheat sheet") with common cross-species physiological parameters relevant to PK, including animal size, liver blood flow, kidney blood flow, and body volumes. When interpreting compound pharmacokinetic (PK) data, it's helpful to have reference values to compare experimental data to [...]