Pharmaceutical Education and Practice

Medicinal Chemistry

Significance of Recent Trends reviews the state of the art and aims to determine the significance of technology and market trends in medicinal chemistry for advancing productivity in drug discovery. Although the fundamental task of medicinal chemists has not changed drastically over time, the chemical and computational tools and perspectives at their disposal have advanced significantly. One in particular, fragment-based drug design, stands out as promising major improvements in research productivity. We examine medicinal chemistry-related approaches and methodologies that drug discovery organizations employ in an effort to increase productivity in early drug discovery and decrease attrition at later pipeline stages. Key topics considered include structure-based drug design, fragment-based drug design, natural products-based drug design, diversity-oriented synthesis, and chemogenomics. An overall assessment of the current and potential value of these approaches is presented. Various flavors of computer-aided drug design are also considered, as the complexity and limitations of drug discovery programs that are based on biochemical screens of large compound collections have been major factors in stimulating the growth of this modality.