Pharmaceutical research combinatorial chemistry

Combinatorial chemistry has provided new ways for the pharmaceutical industry and for academic researchers to address specific problems in a time- and resource-efficient manner. Given the involvement of specific oligosaccharide structures in signal transduction processes, combinatorial carbohydrate libraries are... 

FIG. 1. Pharmaceutical drug development events, a simplified view. Preclinicah Medicinal chemistry, combinatorial chemistry, process research. Clinical. Process R D Manufacturing (operations). 

Most researchers and drug companies, however, still appear to he conhdent that combinatorial chemistry holds untold promise for the future. Though they often admit that there is little to show hy way of approved products that have evolved from combinatorial techniques, they point out that the early years of new technologies are often marked by similar stories of limited success. Eventually, they say, comhinatorial chemistry will take its place with natural products, trial and error, serendipity, and other traditional roads to drug development as an essential tool in the design and production of new pharmaceutical products. 

In recent years, developments in high-throughput screening inspired many pharmaceutical companies to focus and rely on combinatorial chemistry, especially massive parallel synthesis, to find new lead structures. The employed chemistry is often simple and the concept depends on sheer numbers for success. The main research areas were heterocyclic and peptide chemistry, and the resulting structures often lacked complexity and diversity, and most importantly the chance to utilize the evolutionary advantage of natural products with their privileged structures. 

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