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0:00
Hello, this is David Swinney.
I'm going to talk about
How Medicines Were Discovered.
I'm currently retired.
But before that, I was CEO of
the Institute for Rare and
Neglected Diseases Drug Discovery,
and prior to that, I had worked
at Roche for many years.
0:23
My take-home messages
for this talk are that
serendipity, knowledge,
and empiricism are
all utilized in the
discovery of new medicines.
First-in-class medicines are
discovered without a
blueprint as to how
efficacy, safety, and
specificity are to be achieved.
This is due to the fact that
there is an incomplete
understanding of
the molecular mechanisms of
action that will be needed.
Finally, physiological
context is
important and contributes to
the mechanism of specificity.
0:57
My job for the next 30
minutes or so is to
make sense of these
take-home messages.
I will do that through
the following outline
for this presentation.
In the first part,
I'll talk about drug
discovery objectives,
challenges, definitions,
and process.
In the second part,
I'll talk about
how medicines have been
discovered, past and present.
Finally, I'll conclude with
some thoughts that I have on
what has been learned
from past successes.
1:28
The objectives and challenges.
The objective of
drug discovery is to
identify therapeutics that are
effective for treating a
disease, and importantly,
that are safe—that
are tolerable.
The challenges are significant,
and probably the most
significant challenge is that
the failure rate is very high.
This leads to a high cost.
The reasons for this
failure rate are many and
they include trying to identify
a good starting point and
strategy for the discovery,
it's very difficult
to predict safety,
and that translation of
molecular information to
reliable knowledge is
challenging and difficult.
