About 92% of drug candidates make it through the initial Phase 1 testing, but then fail in the later stages of a trial. And the worst possible scenario is when a drug has already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, is on the market and then problems start to arise – like adverse drug reactions, or ADRs.

"There’s a figure, 100 thousand fatalities per year are caused by these undetected ADRs. You know, 177 billion dollars in medical costs. So, that’s comparable to the cost associated with chronic illnesses like diabetes."

Montiago LaBute is an applied statistician at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and he’s part of a team that’s discovered a high-tech method using supercomputers to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain adverse side effects.

"What this allows one to do is use all of the resources on a supercomputer and scale it up so you can do multiple drugs and multiple proteins all in parallel and it allows you to characterize how they interact together using a three-dimensional model that encapsulates the basic physics."