Lead discovery biological assays

Although combinatorial chemistry and HTS have offered medicinal chemists a much broader range of possibilities for lead discovery and optimization, the number of chemical compounds that can be reasonably synthesized, which is sometimes called virtual chemistry space , is stiU far beyond today s capability of chemical synthesis and biological assay. Therefore, medicinal chemists continue to face the same problem as before which compounds should be chosen for the next round of synthesis and testing For chemoinformaticians, the task is to develop and utilize various computer programs to evaluate a very large number of chemical compounds and recommend the most promising ones for bench medicinal chemists. This process can be called virtual... 

Purification A variety of creative and innovative open-access LC/MS formats were developed to address throughput needs within the industrial laboratory. As the preparation of large libraries for lead discovery became routine, the burden placed on analytical techniques focused mainly on throughput and quality (Kyranos and Hogan, 1998 Van Hijfte et al., 1999). Biological assay requirements, however, normally required pure compounds. Thus, the focus shifted toward the use of automated high-throughput purification methods applied to libraries of discrete compounds (Weller, 1998-99). 

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