Drug discovery and selection. Flash-back on the 43(rd) International conference on medicinal chemistry (Lille, France, July 4-7, 2007)

Jointly organized by the French Societe de Chimie Therapeutique (SCT), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC, UK), the Societe Royale de Chimie (SRC, Belgium) and the Koninklijke Vlaamse Chemische Vereniging (KVCV, Belgium), the 43(rd) International conference on medicinal chemistry (RICT43) took place on July 2007 at the School of Pharmacy in Lille (France). On the theme "Drug discovery and selection", the three following major evolutions of the process of drug discovery were illustrated and discussed: the link between physiopathological hypotheses and molecular targets identified through human genome sequencing and the concept of "polypharmacology", the wide range of technologies from screening to new synthetic procedures, and the requirement for a multiparametric optimization even in the very early phases of discovery.