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How many chemical compounds are typically screened before one new drug is approved for human use?
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In the pharmaceutical industry, the process of identifying a new drug is highly rigorous. Typically, between 5,000 and 10,000 chemical compounds must undergo laboratory screening for every single new drug that is eventually approved for human use.1
Of those thousands of screened compounds, the development pipeline generally follows this progression:
- Approximately 250 compounds enter preclinical testing.1
- Only about 5 of those compounds proceed to clinical testing.1
The entire journey from initial discovery to the final marketing of a drug is a lengthy endeavor, often spanning 10 to 15 years. While historical methods were much slower, modern automated in vitro screening techniques now allow researchers to test tens of thousands of compounds for efficacy in a single day.12