The drug discovery pipeline is used to describe the stages in drug discovery. The earliest stage concerns with the identification of potential targets and molecules ('hits') that can modulate their function, while more advanced stages are about developing these hits into viable experimental drugs and testing them in, eventually, clinical trials.

The LED3 network is focused on the fundamentals of chemistry, biology & pharmaceutical sciences to discover new targets, hits and the optimization of the hits into clinical candidates as well as developing new concepts and technologies that accelerate this process.