Biomedical sciences have made significant progress since the sequencing of the human and other genomes. Identification and a better understanding of new protein targets have generated a plethora of information that attributes to diseases, treatments, and toxicity. The cellular signal transduction processes and biochemical pathways that enable life are increasingly understood at the molecular level and the aberrations that result in disease can be defined within this rational context. A high cost, failure of drugs in clinical trials due to lack of efficacy and toxicity, and stringent FDA requirement of preclinical and clinical studies by the FDA have created significant pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to be smart on discovering new drug candidates. In order to reduce the burden of the high-cost Pharmaceutical industry has outsourced most of the discovery research including chemistry, biology, pharmacology, and toxicology studies to contract research organizations (CROs) from China, India, and Europe. This outsourcing strategy has led to poor in-house scientific expertise in the US pharmaceutical industry. On the other hand, academic institutes in the US have maintained their high-level expertise and capabilities, but due to a decline in NIH funding, these capabilities are underused. There is a great opportunity to bridge the need for talent for the pharmaceutical industry and spare capacity of academic institutes that would be a win-win situation for the industry, academia.
In recent years, technology to enable the discovery of potent and selective ligands for molecular targets has advanced such that many complementary approaches exist for creating small molecule tools to interrogate biological processes. Since most of the drug candidates fail because of toxicity concerns, it is important to identify potent, selective, and safe small molecule drugs for clinical development, and expertise in structural biology, computational molecular modeling, and medicinal chemistry are essential requirements to achieve this goal.