Abstract

To discover and develop a new drug it takes $ 800 million and 10-15 years and even then only one third of those reaching the market pay back, the rest of them piggy ride on the successful ones. To be in the market the leading Companies need to spend $2 billion per year and to be successful at least 4 new drugs must be generated. But at present the average is around one per year and even for that there is no guarantee that it will realize the minimum threshold sales level of $ 350 million, in the second year post-launch. It is hyped around that with new technologies involving Combinatorial Libraries, High-throughput screening and use of molecular targets based on genomics and proteomics will reduce the time and the costs involved for new drug development, but this does not seem to be. The main advantage of these new techniques is that drugs discovered would be more target and disease specific. As a part of monthly discussion AI-PEAR-GP decided to discuss this issue and members exchanged views on the SWOT analysis of wet lab drug discovery and computer aided drug discovery. A concise report on discussion on this topic is presented here.