In medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the procedure by which drugs are discovered and/or designed. In the past the majority drugs have been discovered either by identifying the active ingredient from customary remedies or by serendipitous discovery. A new approach has been to appreciate how disease and infection are controlled at the molecular and physiological level and to aim specific entities based on this knowledge.

The procedure of drug discovery involves the identification of candidates, synthesis, characterization, screening, and assays for therapeutic effectiveness. Once a compound has shown its price in these tests, it will begin the method of drug development prior to clinical trials.

Despite advances in technology and accepting of biological systems, drug discovery is still a long process with low rate of fresh therapeutic discovery. Information on the human genome, its series and what it encodes has been hailed as a potential windfall for drug discovery, promising to almost eliminate the bottleneck in therapeutic targets that has been one warning factor on the rate of therapeutic discovery. However, data indicates that "new targets" as opposed to "established targets" are extra prone to drug discovery project failure in common. This data corroborates several thinking underlying a pharmaceutical industry trend beginning at the twist of the twenty-first century and enduring today which finds more risk aversion in target selection between multi-national pharmaceutical companies.

The definition of "target" itself is amazing debated within the pharmaceutical industry. However, the difference between a "new" and "established" target can be made without a full considerate of just what a "target" is. This distinction is normally made by pharmaceutical companies engaged in discovery and development of little molecule therapeutics. In common, "new targets" are all those targets that are not "recognized targets" but which have been or are the topic of drug discovery campaigns. These classically include newly discovered proteins, or proteins whose function has now become clear as a consequence of basic scientific research.