Chemical biology: A new organizing principle for drug discovery

We need to take a fearless mindset to solving the scientific problems in front of us. Whatever science, whatever new technology has been reported, if it looks like it will be useful for drugging the undruggable, that's where we need to go. Chemical biology is a new organizing principle for drug discovery. It's going to definitely take us to the future. As we continue to increase our understanding of human disease, we need to create medicines for these diseases and more and more frequently we bump into situations where the causative agent is an undruggable target. And historically, we would simply throw up our hands and say, oh, there's nothing we can do about this. And chemical biology allows us to rethink that. If we take a trip back in time to what drug discovery was like in the past, and there was less of focus on the different departments that existed, a chemistry department, a biochemistry department. Instead, teams worked very closely together to solve very specific drug discovery problems. If you were to paint a scene from that time, imagine a situation where a chemist has just made a molecule and purified it right there in their lab. Immediately, you're taking it right over to their biology colleagues and asking, can you test this in your animal? Immediately, see, tell me what the effect is. Chemists themselves, of course, would characterize molecules in a very different way than we do today. They perhaps might taste something, see is it a bitter molecule, is it a sour compound? Very different scenario than it is to the science of today. Usually in science, we like to take a nice, predictable path forward. I think as chemical biology stories unfold, very unpredictable. Whatever experiment needs to be done tomorrow is the one you need to start to plan for. If you don't have the expertise for doing that, you need to find the person who can help you with that experiment. Chemical biology team at Novartis is made up of many different disciplines. So we have biologists reporting to chemists, we have chemists reporting to biologists. The goal for chemical biology at Novartis is to drug the undruggable, to make new discoveries that nobody else in the world has made before. With the increase in technologies, increase our understanding in human biology, I think almost all the undruggable targets will become druggable.