The ‘traditional’ view of drug discovery involves a linear process of identifying and validating a target, generating a lead molecule, optimizing its properties and then proceeding to preclinical and clinical studies. In this scheme, the biologists take the lead in identifying and validating a target. The chemists subsequently look for potent smallmolecule inhibitors, most often through optimiz...

Due to the threat posed by the increase of highly resistant pathogenic bacteria, there is an urgent need for new antibiotics; all the more so since in the last 20 years, the approval for new antibacterial agents had decreased. The field of natural product discovery has undergone a tremendous development over the past few years. This has been the consequence of several new and revolutionizing dr...

Drug development, from initial discovery of a promising target to the final medication, is an expensive, lengthy and incremental process. The ultimate goal is to identify a molecule with the desired effect in the human body and to establish its quality, safety and efficacy for treating patients. The latter requirements ensure that the approved medication improves patients’ quality of life, not ...

and position of cyclization was then confirmed through peracylation and NMR spectroscopic analysis of peracylatedjagaricin. Knockout mutants were constructed to provide further confirmation that the jag genes were responsible for jagaricin production, and no jagaricin could be detected when the knockout mutant was grown on mushroom tissue and examined with IMS. Jagaricin’s native biological rol...

Bioinformatic analysis can not only accelerate drug target identification and drug candidate screening and refinement, but also facilitate characterization of side effects and predict drug resistance. High-throughput data such as genomic, epigenetic, genome architecture, cistromic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and ribosome profiling data have all made significant contribution to mechanismbased dr...

Antidepressant drug discovery and development have been put on hold by many pharmaceutical companies. The main reason for this is the negative efficacy studies with novel specific drugs. Here I argue that the main obstacles are the absence of gene tests and biomarkers as an integral part of a diagnostic process. Further, too much emphasis has been put on validating drug candidates in animal mod...