I’m gonna get to a full post on the process soon but have no time for that now. I just want to briefly describe the steps from the perspective of a primarily in vivo pharmacologist:
1. find your target
2. get some idea of structure activity relationship (SAR) for your target
3. design a high-throughput screen (HTS) — preferable two of them (functional and binding)
4. start making and screening compounds
lots of time and frustration passes (maybe frustration is not the right word but its hurry up and wait to get to where you want to be)
5. validate hits from screening
6. validate hits some more, go back to SAR
7. scale up hits for in vivo test
8. do in vivo test (start screaming and yelling if it works)
Number 8 would have been me (and very important turbo grad student) today.
I am a happy man… (and that new Arcade Fire album is pretty good too)
More on all of this later.
JUNIORPROF 
That’s how drug discovery works, more or less, in pharma too. What compound libraries are you using? Commercially available? Or do you have a mass of chemists breaking down the SAR around your target?
DGT… that is the impression I had (but have never worked in pharma). The key difference is when it comes to compounds. We’re doing none of the above. We have med chem but its a three person operation (including the med chem PI). The med chem part of it is completely different for many reasons and that will be the topic for the next post.
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