Hi there. Apologies for any confusion. I was clarifying the intent of the first comment in this thread. I will add some impressionistic comments below in case it helps your future service.
Even when a drug target is unknown, or remains mysterious, very high chances are that the target is a protein. DNA or RNA as targets are niche (DNA is often avoided as a target on purpose and it’s hard to be specific to it without DNA-like material, and RNA is still hard to target effectively, though things are improving). There is not much else of use in the cells (lipids, sugars, cofactors, and metabolites, some examples of which have been targeted by a couple drugs each over the long history of trials, often unintentionally.
Small molecules are an excellent modality for an eventual approved therapy. They almost always (so far) targets a protein. They are hard to design but when they are done well they expose the target to something nature hasn’t seen before in order to get a desired effect. Sometimes people don’t care about the target itself (think recreational drugs, or phenotypic drug discovery), but the target typically remains a protein.
Proteins make up the machinery of the cell. You jam or modify them to achieve desired effects.
Also, and totally minor: there are nowhere close to 19k different approved small molecules. The same drug can be included in multiple products or formulations bringing that number you mentioned to 19k marketed products. Each generic formulation of iboprofen increases the latter count by 1. Counting all the marketed products of pure orange juice may add up to a large number but it is still one ingredient.
No. The analysis in the paper above referred to molecules vs the snippet in the fda referred to products. More generally, other than marketing materials to doctors or patients or very rare exceptions talking about formulations etc, the scientific literature refers to the molecular entity as a drug not the particular named/branded product. I hope that the tool you are building will not mix up such concepts.
Yes that is the standard language in the field. It does not refer to the number of marketed products. Look up the number of novel drugs approved by the FDA per year. It only recently exceeded 40 per year, and the FDA has not existed for very long.
if we consider that you are not making things up(which I am very not confident), then your link is useless in this discussion, because it doesn't give a sense how many non-protein targeting drugs were approved by FDA.
