“The Solvay Pharmaceutical Conferences: where industry meets academia in a search for novel therapies”

At the Crossroad of Drug Discovery

Drug discovery has undergone a revolution over the last two decades. The times are over when absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) of candidate molecules was an add-on to discovery aimed to prepare for development or to comply with regulatory requirement. The current targeted drug design process requires that ADMET profiling is initiated early in the discovery process. Today, biologists and medicinal chemists realize that there is a strong relationship between pharmacodynamic (what the drug does to the organism) and pharmacokinetic (what the organism does to the drug) effects.

A significant contributing factor to the evolution in drug discovery was the methodological and technological revolution with the advent of combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening and profiling, and in silico prediction of target-based activity and ADMET properties. High-throughput screening and in silico methods have accelerated the process towards drugability of new chemical structures.

Another component of the revolution in drug discovery is the replacement of the disease (indication)-based approach by a target-based approach. A better understanding of pathophysiology of diseases and the underlying biological processes of diseases combined with explosive development of genomics and proteomics have been instrumental in the birth of this new paradigm. With target ligands now being designed in silico by molecular modeling and obtained later by means of chemical synthesis, the road is open to a selective in silico screening of ADMET properties.

This volume summarizes discussions of these three aspects of modern drug discovery, i.e. priority for targets, early ADMET assessment, and in silico screening, held during the Solvay Pharmaceuticals Conference entitled “Virtual ADMET Assessment in Target Selection and Maturation” organized May 11–13th, 2005 in Lucerne (Switzerland). The volume offers a selection of the lectures delivered at this conference. We trust that readers from academia as well as from industry will benefit from these studies.

W. Cautreels, C. Steinborn, L. Turski