The test developed by researchers from The University of Manchester will help speeding up the time it takes to make safe and effective medicines available.
The Pharmaceuticals industry is worth billions of pounds a year. The main source of prescription medicines comes from what are known as 'small molecule' drugs, such as statins and antibiotics, researchers said.
The main problem for those who would benefit from new medicines, and for the industry, is that most new small molecule drugs never make it out of the door of the drug companies, because - despite early promise - they either do not work or because they show toxicity.
A famous test, colloquially called the 'rule of 5', was developed by Chris Lipinski and colleagues from Pfizer in 1997.
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However, the rule doesn't normally work for naturally-occurring products, that is, drugs with active ingredients that come from nature (penicillin, for example, which is produced by Penicillium fungi).
Previously, researchers at Manchester helped create a ground-breaking computer model that replicates how the human metabolic network works.
A kind of 'instruction manual' for how our metabolism interacts with human diseases, this model means scientists now know most of the small molecules that are used by our bodies as part of our normal biochemistry.
Armed with this knowledge, the University's research team, led by Professor Douglas Kell of its School of Chemistry and the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, compared the structures of all these molecules, known as metabolites, with all marketed drugs (including natural products).
"In other words, they look very like them. This new 'rule of 0.5' does not mean that a molecule obeying it will necessarily become a successful drug, but what it does mean is that we can now say that a molecule that does not obey it, is very unlikely to succeed," Kell said.
The findings were published in the journal Metabolomics.