The importance of chronobiology to drug discovery

Drug discovery scientists, faced with the myriad challenges involved in developing novel therapeutics as medicines, have tended to overlook the question of the most beneficial time to administer the drug. Recent developments in our understanding of circadian biology and the availability of tools to characterise the molecular clock indicate that time and duration of dosing may have profound consequences for the efficacy and safety of new and existing therapeutic agents. Progress in the field also suggests that many key physiological mechanisms are remarkably dependent on the circadian clock. It has also become clear that a number of diseases with important unmet medical need display marked circadian variation in their symptoms and severity. These discoveries now reveal opportunities for new therapeutic strategies to be developed that act by modulation of biological rhythms. These novel therapeutic approaches are likely to be facilitated by the continuing development of chemical probes and synthetic ligands targeted to an increasing number of the key proteins that regulate the molecular clock.