Advances in Lead Generation

Lead Generation represents a critical drug discovery phase where chemical starting points and their respective mechanism of action, quality, and potential liabilities are largely predefined. Recent advances such as DNA-encoded libraries or fragment-, chemical biology-, and virtual screening-based approaches are today as common as traditional High Throughput Screening. Innovations in characterizing lead quality have allowed more informed decision-making by discovery teams. The key challenge today is to individually tailor the right mix of methods for each project to facilitate data integration with the purpose of creating multiple high-quality lead series, ultimately translating to reduced chemistry-related pipeline attrition.