Comment "one step away" yeah right. (Score 3, Informative) 46
It's not anywhere near one step away. Designing the peptides and getting one or more candidates is the easy part. The next steps are the hard ones, the ones that make pharmaceutical chemists and drug researchers cry:
- Phase I trials to see if it even works as claimed. Expect a 95+% failure rate here. Note that this is where you're going to see the best results for your drug candidate, things never improve from here. The best you can hope for is that they don't get any worse. So if you don't get strong results here you're probably wasting your money.
- Phase II trials to determine the best dosage and pharmacokinetics. Again expect a 95+% failure rate here, and results showing less effectiveness than shown in Phase I.
- Phase III trials to determine behavior in a large sample representative of the target population. Expect a failure rate upwards of 99% here, and a major drop-off in effectiveness. This is where toxicity and serious negative side effects show up, and those can kill your trial dead even if your candidate is working.
Getting through this process will take multiple tries and years of work, assuming you succeed at all. There's a reason they say that the clinic (clinical trials) is where drug candidates go to die.