This book is highly commended in the medicine category in the BMA 2006 medical book competition! It is the winner of the Royal Society of Medicine Library Prize for Medical Book of the Year! Of the initial thousands of compounds with initial promise of drugs only a small handful be developed for human clinical trials and perhaps only one will become an approved drug. This book describes the huge complexities involved in bringing a drug to market and how new molecular understanding and techniques can make the process more targeted and successful.