The developments taking place in genetic chemistry are making it possible to develop millions of cancer drugs in a matter of only a few weeks or moths, rather than the years it has taken in the past (NIH). In 1998 the National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a grant of $5.5 million to create Chemistry-Biology Centers at Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh, Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies in San Diego, and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. These centers were funded to develop and refine robotic drug production and screening technology emerging from the field of combinatorial chemistry. Using automated methods, chemists and biologists will be able to manufacture and test potential anti-cancer drugs hundreds of times faster than they could do using older techniques.
Scores of cancer-causing or promoting genes have been discovered, and this has caused a demand for high-volume drug screening (NIH). Every newly discovered gene and the protein it codes for offers a new target for anti-cancer drugs, and finding drug molecules that are the right size and shape to fit the binding sites on these proteins has been a slow, tedious process in the past. Using the new technology, researchers can quickly produce a wide array of molecules and test them for anti-cancer activity. When they find a hit or a near-miss, this provides a template molecule which can be used to churn out hundreds of similar molecules. These molecules can be stored in a database, which can be made available to other researchers.
Pharmaceutical companies are pursuing these technologies because they can increase drug-screening rates a hundredfold or more, and their market-driven desire to bring more drugs to market has already produced results (NIH). Several companies have discovered potential anti-cancer and anti-HIV drugs using automated drug development and screening. Whether or not they will all turn out to be sa...