Four disruptive strategies for removing drug discovery bottlenecks

Drug discovery is shifting focus from industry to outside partners and, in the process, creating new bottlenecks. Technologies like high throughput screening (HTS) have moved to a larger number of academic and institutional laboratories in the USA, with little coordination or consideration of the outputs and creating a translational gap. Although there have been collaborative public–private partnerships in Europe to share pharmaceutical data, the USA has seemingly lagged behind and this may hold it back. Sharing precompetitive data and models may accelerate discovery across the board, while finding the best collaborators, mining social media and mobile approaches to open drug discovery should be evaluated in our efforts to remove drug discovery bottlenecks. We describe four strategies to rectify the current unsustainable situation.

► As pharma continues to outsource multiple bottlenecks are created in drug discovery. ► We propose four disruptive strategies for removing these bottlenecks. ► We describe how these strategies will have impact. ► The notion of what are precompetitive areas will move later in drug discovery. ► Software will be used to learn from patients, find the best researchers and collaborate.