Drug discovery is a highly complicated, tedious and potentially rewarding approach associated with great risk. Pharmaceutical companies literally spend millions of dollars to produce a single successful drug. The drug discovery process also need strict compliance to the directions on manufacturing and testing of new drug standards before their release into market. All these regulations created the necessity to develop advanced approaches in drug discovery. The contributions of advanced technologies including high resolution analytical instruments, 3-D biological printing, next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics have made positive impact on drug discovery & development. Fortunately, all these advanced technologies are evolving at the right time when new issues are rising in drug development process. In the present review, we have discussed the role of genomics and advanced analytical techniques in drug discovery. Further, we have also discussed the significant advances in drug discovery as case studies.
A sensitive and selective gas chromatography with mass spectrometry method was developed for the simultaneous determination of three organophosphorus pesticides, namely, chlorpyrifos, malathion, and diazinon in three different food commodities (milk, apples, and drinking water) employing solid-phase extraction for sample pretreatment. Pesticide extraction from different sample matrices was carried out on Chromabond C18 cartridges using 3.0 mL of methanol and 3.0 mL of a mixture of dichloromethane/acetonitrile (1:1 v/v) as the eluting solvent. Analysis was carried out by gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry using selected-ion monitoring mode. Good linear relationships were obtained in the range of 0.1-50 μg/L for chlorpyrifos, and 0.05-50 μg/L for both malathion and diazinon pesticides. Good repeatability and recoveries were obtained in the range of 78.54-86.73% for three pesticides under the optimized experimental conditions. The limit of detection ranged from 0.02 to 0.03 μg/L, and the limit of quantification ranged from 0.05 to 0.1 μg/L for all three pesticides. Finally, the developed method was successfully applied for the determination of three targeted pesticides in milk, apples, and drinking water samples each in triplicate. No pesticide was found in apple and milk samples, but chlorpyrifos was found in one drinking water sample below the quantification level.