Chemists at the University of Waterloo, SCIEX and Pfizer have discovered a new way to help the pharmaceutical industry identify and test new drugs, which could revolutionize drug development, and substantially reduce the cost and time drugs need to reach their market.
The study, published in the journal ACS Central Science, outlines a technique called differential mobility spectrometry (DMS) which analyzes drug molecules based on their response to an electrical field and the condensation-evaporation cycles the drug experiences in that field via a process, known as microsolvation.
“We can use this technique to measure drug properties in seconds to minutes with only nanograms of sample,” says Scott Hopkins, a professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo and corresponding author on the paper. “It’s cost saving and high throughput, so you can test hundreds, even thousands of drugs quickly, increasing the rate of drug discovery.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-drugs-cheaper-faster.html#jCp