1. Stages of drug discovery

The term medicinal chemistry was introduced by IUPAC.

The aim of medicinal chemistry (therapeutic chemistry) is to discover active ingredients leading to new therapeutic applications and the marketing of new drugs.

• There are a number of stages in the drug discovery process before human clinical trials begin.

The first, creative stage, consists in identifying interesting biological properties in an active ingredient, either synthetically prepared or of natural origin, and constituting a leader. This stage may involve high-throughput screening, using automated robots, of compounds from chemical substance collections (chemical libraries) or obtained by combinatorial chemistry (automated high-throughput syntheses). Knowledge of the therapeutic properties of raw materials of plant, fungal...