ABSTRACT
The task of new drug discovery remains a formidable undertaking. Current estimates of the cost of bringing a new drug to the market are in the range of $1.2-$1.5 billion. There is also a signi cant time commitment-typically it takes 10-14 years to bring a compound from initial discovery to being an approved drug in the market. One of the reasons it takes so long and costs so much is that there is a lot of attrition along the way (most compounds fail). The challenge of new drug discovery is to sort through millions of compounds in a compound library to nd a few initial lead compounds and then sift through thousands of new compounds as part of the lead optimization phase with the goal of getting 10-20 compounds that are suitable for development. As shown in Figure 1.1, it takes a total of 14 compounds selected for development in order to reach the goal of 1 compound that becomes a new drug on the market (for more on this topic see Chapter 2). It is this critical lead optimization phase during which there is a continuous need for getting thousands of compounds assayed that the capabilities of a higher throughput bioanalytical scientist are required.
