Camerino-Noordwijkerhout - 14th Symposium: Ongoing progress in receptor chemistry: 7-11 September 2003, Camerinom Italy

David J Triggle (State University of New York, USA) provided a summary of the meeting in a talk entitled 'Drug discovery in the 21st century'. He focused on the events since Paul Ehrlich's optimistic statement of 1913 and the current state of drug discovery enterprise in which the introduction of genomics and the tools of combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening have not led to commensurate increases of productivity in new drug discovery, although they are associated with major increases in cost (Drug Dev Res (2003) 59:269). Among the reasons for this are the smaller than expected size of the human genome and the relatively small number of potentially 'druggable' targets, and the need to validate these. The complexity of the human cell derives in large part from the complexity of the signaling networks and this means that systems biology approaches are increasingly necessary. Despite these difficulties it is not to be denied that the drug discovery process has been extremely valuable to human health, particularly in affluent countries. However, these benefits are not uniformly distributed and there are major issues to be faced concerning the access of poor countries to necessary medicines and the ability of the affluent countries to deliver medicines for neglected diseases.