Group testing with blockers and synergism

Discovery and development of a new drug can cost hundreds of millions of do llars. Pharmaceutical companies have used group testing methodology routine ly as one of the efficient high throughput screening techniques to search f or "lead" compounds among collections or. hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds. The lead compounds can be modified to produce new and effective molecules, which eventually may lead to new drugs. This article develops m odels and estimation procedures to obtain quantitative information from dat a in such applications. It investigates group testing procedures and studie s cost efficiency when the standard assumption adopted by Dorfman, that tes ted items act independently of one another, is violated. The investigation is focused on, but not limited to, the square array pooling method, and the methodologies developed are illustrated through simulations and a drug dis covery dataset from Glare Wellcome Inc.