In the field of
drug discovery,
reverse pharmacology also known as
target base drug discovery (TDD), a hypothesis is first made that modulation of the activity of a specific
protein target will have beneficial therapeutic effects.
Screening of
chemical libraries of
small molecules is then used to identify compounds that bind with high affinity to the target. The hits from these screens are then used as starting points for drug discovery. This method became popular after the
sequencing of the
human genome which allowed rapid cloning and synthesis of large quantities of purified proteins. This method is the most widely used in drug discovery today. Differently than the classical (
forward) pharmacology, with the reverse pharmacology approach
in vivo efficacy of identified active (
lead) compounds is usually performed in the final
drug discovery stages.