From molecule to medicine, with Ross Rheingans-Yoo

I'm not a pharmaceutical chemist, but I've been to quite a few of their talks.

I'm really bothered by the focus on an academic group which 'investigates the effect of a particular molecule on a specific biological system, hoping that this effect will eventually help resolve a disease.' followed by following this particular molecule as 'the drug' all the way until approval.

My understanding is this omits a lot of difficult steps.

First, this is structured as the 'prototypical drug development story', but another story is that a group discovers that a given protein or other target is an important step in a given disease. Researchers at a company then evaluate it to see if they have anything which can affect that target, with none of the lead identification coming from academic. As I understand it, this is the far more common case.

Second, even the initial molecule has useful activity, it may have some other bad characteristics. The initial structure may go through a series of optimizations to, for example, reduce toxicity. The final drug may be quite different from the original "particular" molecule, perhaps only sharing some key pharmacophores.

Third, there is no mention of the process/scale-up chemistry used to turn a lab-oriented synthesis, with a lot of manual steps and waste issues, into one where 'Manufacturing authorized molecules is inexpensive'.