It depends, on the chemistry research side the pharmaceutical companies still do a lot, if not most of the heavy lifting. Cheminformatics benefits from the big

It depends, on the chemistry research side the pharmaceutical companies still do a lot, if not most of the heavy lifting. Cheminformatics benefits from the big scale in these organisations and also do the of the type of thing discussed in this article. The same with other parts of this research, like having access to the fancy spectrometers etc. Finding and understanding new compounds with potentially useful properties is only part of R&D process, then developing the biology all the way through to making it a drug fit for human consumption is also quite risky because most of them fail and that's where the small companies come in who takes up that risk.