The end of XX century witnessed both, a fast growth of number of new drugs available on the market as well as reversal of the growth trend around the year 1997. There are several reasons for that phenomenon, they include exponential growth in cost of drug development, meeting of medical needs in some areas (“the low hanging fruit has been picked”), increased demands to document efficacy and safety (larger and more costly clinical trials), and several others. Nevertheless, large number of unmet needs still exists and awaits better therapy: tumor disease, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, asthma, neurodegenerative disease, and many others. Therefore pharmaceutical industry as well as academia is strongly interested in overcoming the present difficulties.

Ways to respond to the challenges include better screening technologies and strategies, better chemistry and increasing of pools of innovative molecules, and better academia-industry interactions, among others. These efforts are supported by the state and financed both by the government and pharmaceutical industry. Herein two different examples of such undertakings will be briefly presented. The first is EU-OPENSCREEN, an international programme financed within the 7FP under the auspices of European Commission; the second is a new concept in drug design based on use of boron clusters as pharmacophores and modulators of biomolecules. The EU-OPENSCREEN project is aimed at keeping Europe at the forefront of the biological and medical sciences and at stimulation industrial research and commercial exploitation of chemical biology potentials. As a major objective, the project aims at bioprofiling and identifying small-molecule modulators for individual functions of proteins and nucleic acids, and forms a base for increasing the availability of new bioactive compounds.

Application of boron clusters in drug design is based on unique properties of polyhedral heteroboranes and makes it possible to design boron-containing molecules with new biological characteristics. This offer medicinal chemists and pharmacologists a rare opportunity to explore and pioneer new areas of molecular design and medicinal applications.

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1. ESI-MS/MS techniques for structural analysis of boron clusters