ReviewNature reviews. Drug discovery2011
How were new medicines discovered?
Review in Nature reviews. Drug discovery, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 699 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
699 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pharmacological modulation of conditioned fear in the fear-potentiated startle test: a systematic review and meta-analysis of animal studies.Psychopharmacology · 2023Pooled it
- High-content morphological profiling by Cell Painting in 3D spheroids.Nature communications · 2026Article
- VCCV: conservative transcriptomic corroboration for measurement prioritization of computational drug-target hypotheses.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- FuTCM-PDD: a multi-level information fusion framework integrating KAN modeling and AutoML for phenotype-based drug discovery from Traditional Chinese Medicine.Chinese medicine · 2026Article
- Technology profiles in FDA-approved new molecular entities, 2013-2024: a latent class analysis.Daru : journal of Faculty of Pharmacy, Tehran University of Medical Sciences · 2026Article
- Artificial Intelligence-Guided Phenotypic Drug Repurposing Against Streptococcus pneumoniae.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- GEM-GPT Enables Personalized Cell Type-Resolved Therapeutic Design for Systems Pharmacology.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Cancer Drug Discovery: Promise, Challenges, and Emerging Opportunities.Cancers · 2026Review
- Natural Products and Neuroregeneration: Rethinking Discovery Beyond Bioavailability Through Pseudo-Natural Product Design.Biomedicines · 2026Review
- A Landscape ofBiology · 2026Review
- A computational framework for proteome-wide target profiling of natural products: mechanistic and therapeutic insights into ginsenosides.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Artificial intelligence-based phenotypic screening using Aspergillus oryzae identified a novel antifungal RK-1205-I.The Journal of antibiotics · 2026Article
- HTS-Oracle X: AI-Guided Prospective Discovery of Small Molecule Immune Checkpoint Binders.ACS medicinal chemistry letters · 2026Article
- Review
- Antibacterial drug discovery: challenges and preclinical promises from synthetic small molecules.Chemical Society reviews · 2026Review
- High-Throughput CETSA Identifies Small Molecule Modulators of ILT3 (LILRB4) with Functional Activity in Human iPSC-Derived Microglia for Alzheimer's Disease.ACS medicinal chemistry letters · 2026Article
- Bridging the phenotype-target gap for molecular generation via multi-objective reinforcement learning.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Review
- Integrated Screening Cascades for Ion-Channel Drug Discovery: Linking Structure, Electrophysiology, Safety Pharmacology, and Human-Relevant Models.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- A comprehensive pharmacological survey across heterogeneous patient-derived glioblastoma stem cell models.iScience · 2026Article
639 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Preclinical strategies that are used to identify potential drug candidates include target-based screening, phenotypic screening, modification of natural substances and biologic-based approaches. To investigate whether some strategies have been more successful than others in the discovery of new drugs, we analysed the discovery strategies and the molecular mechanism of action (MMOA) for new molecular entities and new biologics that were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1999 and 2008. Out of the 259 agents that were approved, 75 were first-in-class drugs with new MMOAs, and out of these, 50 (67%) were small molecules and 25 (33%) were biologics. The results also show that the contribution of phenotypic screening to the discovery of first-in-class small-molecule drugs exceeded that of target-based approaches - with 28 and 17 of these drugs coming from the two approaches, respectively - in an era in which the major focus was on target-based approaches. We postulate that a target-centric approach for first-in-class drugs, without consideration of an optimal MMOA, may contribute to the current high attrition rates and low productivity in pharmaceutical research and development.
Indexed as
Identifiers
21701501What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.