Pharmacokinetics and metabolism in early drug discovery

The need for high-throughput approaches in absorption, distribution, metabo lism and excretion studies is driven by the impact of high-speed chemistry and pharmacological screening. Perhaps an even greater impact is that these studies will, in the future, provide large data sets that can be used to p redict biological events related to absorption, bioavailability and metabol ism of drugs. Through linking of in silico and in vitro methods, considerab le progress has recently been made towards this future perspective. Despite this progress, these approaches do not yet replace in vivo methods.