This is the first of a series of blogs that will discuss the history, challenges, excitement, and aspirations of drug discovery with a special emphasis on work being conducted at the Fiske Drug Discovery Laboratory at UVA. My goal is to encourage the faculty, staff and students of UVA and the wider community to think about our collective efforts to understand how drugs work and how we find them. This is a fabulously dynamic time in pharmacology and I hope to share it with you.
According to PubMed in the past 40 years there have been 128,212 articles published in the peer-reviewed literature on drug discovery. In 1971 there were 364 on drug discovery as the term was not widely used then, by 2014 we reached >10,882 publications. Imagine trying to read that many papers? Simply put there has been a knowledge explosion. In future blogs I will discuss how we try to cope with the information overflow. I have listed below some of the other topics, in no particular order, that you will find in the upcoming blogs.
- A short history of drug discovery
- Great books to read about drug discovery
- Can we learn something about drugs from our pets?
- How has the Internet changed drug discovery research?
- The emerging Virginia Drug Discovery Consortium
- The social costs and benefits of new drug research and new drugs.
- Funding basic research in drug discovery.
- The neglected, neglected diseases.
- Is hypothesis-based research a straightjacket for progress?
- Are we looking at the right things or the easy things?
- Repetition and reflection in drug discovery research.
As you can see, there are lots of things to cover. I look forward to your comments.
Tags: Drug Discovery
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