Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • BIOBUSINESS BRIEFS

Novel drug targets in 2018

  1. Oleg Ursu

    1. Computational and Structural Chemistry, Merck & Co., Boston, MA, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  2. Meir Glick

    1. Computational and Structural Chemistry, Merck & Co., Boston, MA, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  3. Tudor Oprea

    1. Department of Internal Medicine, Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Albuquerque, NM, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

To investigate the mechanistic novelty of new drugs introduced in 2018 — a record year for FDA approvals — we tracked the year of first approval of new drugs in the United States, as well as in Europe and Japan. We identified 39 drugs that have mode-of-action (MoA) biomolecular targets annotated (as defined in Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 16, 19–34; 2017), according to primary literature or package insert information. Here, we discuss the 13 MoA targets that had not been previously modulated by an approved drug, that is, novel molecular drug targets introduced in 2018 (Table 1).

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 18, 328 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41573-019-00052-5

This article is the first in a series from the NIH Common Fund Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) program. The goal of IDG is to catalyse research on understudied proteins from druggable gene families by providing reagents, phenotypes and a mineable database; focusing on GPCRs, kinases and ion channels. For more information, see https://druggablegenome.net/

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links