New paradigms in drug design and discovery

The new millennium has ushered in an era of science that will revolutionize a great majority of our daily activities. That revolution is being experienced by a growing number of the population who are pushing the average life expectancy closer to the 80-year mark. The primary reason for this increase is the changes we have made in the last 2-3 decades both in how we live our lives as well as how we treat our maladies when they arise. The advent of new techniques in diagnostics and surgery have allowed many to survive debilitating illnesses when their chances would have been slim only a few years ago. In addition, several new therapeutic agents have been developed in the latter part of the 20th century that have improved our quality of life and increased our overall survival time. New medicines to treat cardiovascular, degenerative, infectious, and neoplastic diseases are rapidly being discovered in an effort to further lengthen our lifetimes. The processes used by academic and industrial scientist to discover new drugs has recently experienced a true renaissance with many new and exciting techniques being developed in only the past 5-10 years. In this review, we will attempt to outline these latest protocols that chemists and biomedical scientist are currently employing to rapidly bring new drugs to the clinic.