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 lagged behind. Sharing precompetitive computational models may be the next frontier to provide confidence in the quality of leads produced and attract investment. We now suggest four disruptive strategies for removing drug discovery bottlenecks and discuss some novel ideas for the future to rectify the current unsustainable situation.