Abstract

Building New Research Models for Next Generation Drug Discovery

Prabhat Arya, Professor and Head, Dr Reddy's Institute of Life Sciences

The quest to moving away from single gene products, such as isolated enzymes, and to embracing biological challenges associated with the complex human system, are beginning to challenge our current thinking. All this is leading to a growing interest in targets dealing with the regulation and de-regulation of highly organized cell signaling pathways. This shift in our task is also causing a major shake-up in building small molecule collections to search for active compounds as a starting point. Typically, the pharma sector-based chemical toolbox is enriched with heterocyclic compounds, or in general, the compounds are dominated by sp2 bonds. It is now well-accepted that the type of small molecules needed to undertake these challenging targets are neither usually found in the pharma collection nor they are easily accessible from other sources. To overcome the challenges that are associated with handling the signaling pathway-based targets and the set of compounds needed to hunt for next generation functional probes leading to drug discovery, various models are emerging. These models are aimed at de-risking this tough drug discovery road and demand serious integrated efforts between: (i) academia and industry, (ii) big pharma and emerging bio-techs; and (iii) the combination of these two. Towards these objectives, some of the recent success stories will be highlighted.