High-throughput screening applied to drug synthesis process development.

Combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening have greatly increased the rate of lead drug molecule discovery. The increase in the number of compounds in the early phase of the drug development pipeline has, however, created a bottleneck in the development of cost-effective, scalable chemical processes for the manufacture of these drug candidates. Thus, pharmaceutical chemical development groups and their suppliers are implementing their own forms of high-throughput screening to improve their productivity to solve this bottleneck. Developments for implementing high-throughput screening for chemical process development are reviewed.