The Center for Advanced Study of Drug Action (CASDA) will develop and implement procedures to improve the prediction of drug activity in humans thereby increasing the success rate of new drug approvals. To meet this goal the Center will establish academic-industrial partnerships and deploy state-of-the-art instrumentation together with approaches such as radiotracer synthesis and positron emission tomography to explore the mechanism of drug action with particular emphasis on the role that drug-target kinetics play in controlling drug activity in the non-equilibrium environment of the human body. The research will be at the intersection of chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering and mathematics, providing a rich training environment for investigators, collaborators and students in quantitative approaches to drug design and discovery, and leading to the development of drugs with improved efficacy and safety.