Chapter 13: The Business Case for Green Chemistry in Drug Discovery

The global pharmaceutical industry is widely viewed as inefficient and unable to provide medicines for the entire global population. Greening the pharmaceutical industry is important for attaining sustainability and assuring the wide availability of new medicines essential for human health. Green chemistry techniques that are environmentally friendly and reduce cost are important. Additional approaches that improve the efficiency of drug discovery are also green, by virtue of improving the business efficiency of the industry as a whole. These approaches include in silico techniques for improving the success rate of drugs in development. New synthetic methodologies that reduce the cost of drug synthesis, improve access to drug candidate molecules, and introduce important structural diversity into drug discovery also meet green criteria. Drug targeting of the active site is important for improving success rates for drugs in development and minimizing the effective doses of drugs. Reverse pharmacology, based on traditional knowledge, is a strikingly different approach to drug discovery. Reverse pharmacology can also be very efficient and effective for discovering new medicines.