It takes an average of 10 to 12 years to bring a promising compound from the research laboratory to the doctor’s surgery. Discovery and development costs for a new medicines average more that £500 million. For every medicine that reaches the market, more than 5,000 candidate compounds often have to be rejected.

Combinatorial chemistry and high-throughout screening are new techniques that allow many thousands of compounds to be tested in a relatively short time, but finding a new molecule with the right therapeutic and safety profile is still a long and difficult task.

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