Hit Triage: Medicinal Chemistry Strategies To Improve The Odds Of Success In Discovery

This chapter describes the process of collecting and analyzing information in order to make decisions which help a project move through a key early stage in drug discovery. It explains, in general, the sources of hits for a drug discovery program and explores the link between potency and efficiency in evaluating lead matter. The chapter then illustrates the collection of both pharmacokinetic data as well as safety data, and describes the relevance of that data and the process of using it to make decisions. Of course, there is no one "right" or "wrong" way to do the work contained in this chapter, but the practice of efficiently building a network of information on compounds, and then using that to make informed decisions can help to shift the odds of success in drug discovery.