Introduction: Drug Discovery in the 21st Century

The discovery, development, and registration of a pharmaceutical is an immensely expensive operation and represents a unique challenge of high attrition rate of drugs. Early identification of poor or noncompetitive candidates is thus extremely important, forming the basis for screening processes in pharmaceutical discovery and development. This article focuses on a wide variety of approaches to the discovery and identification of potential new drugs. Keywords: drug discovery; screens; therapeutic activity; genomics; combinatorial chemistry