Question: What kind of drugs do you make?

Lee Steinberg answered on 4 Mar 2019:

I don’t work on a single drug discovery project. Instead, I develop techniques that can be used in single projects. For example, I develop methods which can be used to predict the solubility of a new drug – this is useful because if a drug isn’t very soluble, there is no point wasting time and money making it!

I also develop techniques that can be used to say: If this drug acts against this protein, and this similar drug acts against a different protein, is it worth us seeing if the first drug is good against the second protein? There are trillions of potential compounds that could be made in a particular project, so I help synthetic chemists narrow down their options!