Successful drug hunters are an elite group within the pharmaceutical industry, particularly given the difficulty of discovering and developing medicines. What distinguishes those who do find drugs that work from those who do not is not easily defined. Here, we track one success through a decade of exhaustive and highly innovative work by a young group of researchers at Pfizer Sandwich Laboratories in the United Kingdom. They discovered and developed maraviroc, a vital addition to the armory of HIV drugs.
Back in 1996, a series of reports published in quick succession in Nature,
The answer lay in ...