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How medicines were discovered

Published on May 29, 2025   29 min

A selection of talks on Pharmaceutical Sciences

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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.

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