Tag: Rational drug design

Despite costing billions and taking over a decade to develop, only a fraction of drug candidates successfully reach the market. The core process that drives this scientific endeavor is drug design, and understanding its basic principle—molecular recognition—is fundamental to creating more effective and safer medicines.

Despite advances in research, the overall probability of success for new molecular entities is only about 12%. Rational drug design, a systematic and knowledge-based approach, directly addresses this challenge by meticulously defining what are the four steps in rational drug design to increase efficiency and success rates in creating new medications.

With a single drug discovery program costing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and taking over a decade to complete, modern pharmacology has moved beyond trial-and-error. This shift has redefined **what is the primary goal of drug design**, which now focuses on the rational, data-driven creation of molecules that are highly effective, selective, and safe.

Up to 90% of drug candidates fail during development, largely due to issues with efficacy and safety. Understanding what is the key aspect of drug design—achieving a specific and effective interaction with a biological target—is crucial for improving these statistics and advancing new therapeutic treatments.

Nobel laureates Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings, along with William Lange, synthesized azathioprine in 1956 as a derivative of their earlier discovery, 6-mercaptopurine. Their work answered the question of who discovered the drug azathioprine and fundamentally changed the approach to drug development.