Answer to the Question: what is “molecular obesity” and why is it a potential problem in drug discovery programs?
Despite the increase in global biology and chemistry knowledge the discovery of effective and safe newdrugs seems to become harder rather than easier. Some of this challenge is due to increasing demandsfor safety and novelty, but some of the risk involved in this should be controllable if we had moreeffectively learnt from our failures. This perspective reflects on some of the learnings of recent years inrelation to the causes of attrition. The term Molecular Obesity is introduced to describe our tendency tobuild potency into molecules molecules by the inappropriate use of lipophilicity which leads to the prematuredemise of drug candidates.
