Alleyn T. Plowright 
Target Discovery and Validation 
Methods and Strategies for Drug Discovery

The modern drug developers’ guide for making informed choices among the diverse target identification methods

Target Discovery and Validation: Methods and Strategies for Drug Discovery offers a hands-on review of the modern technologies for drug target identification and validation. With contributions from noted industry and academic experts, the book addresses the most recent chemical, biological, and computational methods. Additionally, the book highlights techologies that are applicable to ‘difficult’ targets and drugs directed at multiple targets, including chemoproteomics, activity-based protein profiling, pathway mapping, genome-wide association studies, and array-based profiling.

Throughout, the authors highlight a range of diverse approaches, and target validation studies reveal how these methods can support academic and drug discovery scientists in their target discovery and validation research. This resource:

-Offers a guide to identifying and validating targets, a key enabling technology without which no new drug development is possible
-Presents the information needed for choosing the appropriate assay method from the ever-growing range of available options
-Provides practical examples from recent drug development projects, e. g. in kinase inhibitor profiling

Written for medicinal chemists, pharmaceutical professionals, biochemists, biotechnology professionals, and pharmaceutical chemists, Target Discovery and Validation explores the current methods for the identification and validation of drug targets in one comrpehensive volume. It also includes numerous practical examples.

Table of Content

Introduction to target discovery and target validation
Chemical strategies for evaluating new drug targets
Affinity-based chemoproteomics for target identification
Activity based protein profiling
Kinobeads – a chemical proteomic approach for kinase-inhibitor selectivity profiling and target discovery
Label-free techniques for target discovery and validation
Reverse translation to support efficient drug target selection and stratified medicine
Elucidating target biology and drug mechanism-of-action across human cell based model systems
Cell biology methods in target validation
Genetic manipulation/modulation for target discovery and validation
Computational approaches for target inference
Bioinformatic approaches in the understanding of Mechanism of Action

About the author

Alleyn Plowright, Ph D, is Head of Integrated Drug Discovery Germany at Sanofi. He leads a cross-disciplinary research unit driving projects from target validation through to pre-clinical development. He has been instrumental in delivering a number of compounds into the clinic, including two compounds currently in phase 2 clinical trials, and has authored more than 50 publications and patents.