Drug discovery is the main activity of most innovative pharmaceutical companies.  Discovery and synthesis of small molecule drugs was the principal focus for many decades as small molecules can be inexpensively produced, and most are highly stable which permits long-term storage without special facilities.  In recent years, more drug candidates have been protein-based drugs produced by recombinant DNA technology.

Manufacturing of drugs was once the primary basis of competition in the pharmaceutical industry as a few popular compounds were produced on an industrial scale, but there are now literally hundreds of contract manufacturing organizations and generic drug producers throughout the world with the technology to produce most drugs, both small molecules and proteins, at very low cost.  Even the major pharmaceutical companies source more than 50% of their doses from third-party manufacturers.

What remains is fierce competition to develop new molecules and proteins, and to identify novel therapeutic uses for these drugs.  In many cases,  otherwise safe and effective drugs have been abandoned by the original developer due to a change in their business strategy or lack of efficacy for the original target indication.  Cascia's focus is to identify drugs that can contribute to our expanding portfolio of antifibrotic drug candidates, and to discover novel mechanisms of actions that support our cellular therapeutic platform.

More information about our pipeline of drug candidates is provided on the pages linked below.