> What's the equivalent in chemistry/biology/pharma? That is, how do you get into the field/expertise/mindset in which you're creating and testing out drug compositions in a methodical way that Dr. Conover did when he was able to discover and confirm tetracycline in a matter of months.
I'm not a chemist, but several times I've walked up to a organic/medicinal chemist and been told something like "putting a fluorine there (pointing at a chemical structure) should make it bind better. I can do that for you in a week or two."
There's apparently whole bodies of work [0], especially in medicinal chemistry, where you methodically put a fluorine at different positions around a ring (or something similar) and you test each new compound. Sometimes one will have some property that's a few orders of magnitude better than the rest, and you get a "miracle" drug.
Fluorinations are very popular as fluorine is not that much bigger than hydrogen, so you don't tend to cause big confirmational changes with the swap. It's also very stable, so it's doesn't screw up your pharmacokinetics. And finally, fluorine is super polar, so a simple swap can dramatically change the drug's activity.
As someone else said, drug design is still a lot of hand waving and hit and miss. Sometimes you can make the smallest changes to a molecule and have a huge impact. The fentanyls are a good example. Swap a hydrogen for methyl and you can increase potency by 100x.
I'm not a chemist, but several times I've walked up to a organic/medicinal chemist and been told something like "putting a fluorine there (pointing at a chemical structure) should make it bind better. I can do that for you in a week or two."
There's apparently whole bodies of work [0], especially in medicinal chemistry, where you methodically put a fluorine at different positions around a ring (or something similar) and you test each new compound. Sometimes one will have some property that's a few orders of magnitude better than the rest, and you get a "miracle" drug.
[0] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm800219f