Drug discovery in the academia works very differently from drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry (the companies that actually profit from selling drugs)

Drug discovery in the academia works very differently from drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry (the companies that actually profit from selling drugs). Have you ever wondered how people find out the exact combination of complicated molecules (tri-ethyl bi-methyl chloro fluoro benzo whatever) that help treat a specific disease? That's like finding the proverbial needle in a gigantic haystack... Unless you have the money and equipment to perform a brute-force attack. My professor once described to me one of the methods that drug companies use to come up with new drugs. I forgot a lot of the details, but the basic idea is that they keep an eye on medical journals for newly discovered receptors (the part of a cell that molecules can bind to), and then throw every plausible combination of molecules at that receptor until they find one that sticks. If the one that sticks the best happens to be patented by someone else, you just keep throwing similar molecules until you find the one that sticks the second best. Large pharmaceutical companies can pull this off because they keep a huge repertoire of all sorts of molecules that are utterly useless at the moment but might stick to some receptor that has yet to be discovered. It really is a kind of brute-force attack, aided by the biochemical equivalent of a rainbow table. Apparently, this method works.