David Woodmansee's research at a pharmaceutical company exposed him to the advantages of high-throughput screening, which allows thousands of substances to be quickly tested to identify potential relationships between medical issues and drug compounds. High-throughput screening enables scientists to rapidly search libraries of hundreds of thousands of compounds and identify links between drugs and medically relevant receptors at a rate of up to 20,000 compounds per week, helping to more quickly advance treatments for patients while also lowering the cost of drug development.