Industrial Chemistry and Aqua Technology

Lead Drug Discovery

The method by which a drug is delivered can have a significant effect on its efficacy. To minimize drug degradation and loss, to prevent harmful side-effects and to increase drug bioavailability and the fraction of the drug accumulated in the required zone, various drug delivery and drug targeting systems are currently under development. Attempts are being made to develop therapeutic proteins for cancer, hepatitis, and autoimmune conditions, but their clinical applications are limited, except in the cases of drugs based on erythropoietin, granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, interferon-alpha, and antibodies, owing to problems with fundamental technologies for protein drug discovery. Technologies profiled include those used for biomarker and target discovery such as high throughput screening, signal transduction, micro array, RNAi, metabolomics, toxicogenomics, biosensors and nanotechnology.