Split-and-mix approach

In addition, the conversion of a compound collection of drug-like heterocycles as might be used in a medicinal chemistry program was investigated. An equimolar mixture of 20 pyrazole acids, synthesized by a split-and-mix approach, was treated with methyl resin 10 (Ri = CH3, 5 equiv.) for 6 h to yield the respective pyrazole esters. All 20 pyrazole acids in the starting reaction mixture and all their corresponding 20 pyrazole methyl esters in the product mixture could be identified by FT-ICR MS coupled to micro-HPLC with a relative mass error <2.2 ppm. 

The split and mix approach forms the basis of all solid support-based combinatorial synthetic strategies. 

Figure 9 An OBOC library synthesized according to the split-and-mix approach.

Moreover, two indoline-Uke libraries were prepared (Scheme 1.6). A hydroxyindoline-derived scaffold 26 was used to prepare a tricyclic indoline-based library 27 by an IRORl split-and-mix approach on solid-support." A later indoline-alkaloid-like polycyclic library incorporated additional diversity, and the stereochemistry at the ring junction was controlled." ... 

The solid-phase technique of split and mix synthesis relies on the efficiency of mixture-based synthesis to provide very large libraries (millions) of discrete compounds (Figure 4).[161 In this approach, each resin bead is treated with a single building block for each synthesis step. Thus any single resin bead possesses identical copies of one library member, but the identity of the library member on any bead is lost due to the mix step of the process. Elegant strategies have been developed to chemically encode the syn-... 

In Section II.C we will present novel tricyclic xanthene derived amino acid templates, which allow the construction of libraries of cyclic conformationally constrained peptide loop mimetics using the split-and-mix method without having to use tagging and deconvolution strategies. In Section III we will focus on parallel and combinatorial approaches devoted to the synthesis of small molecule, non-peptidic compound collections, which in addition offer the possibility to incorporate structural features derived from protein epitope mapping into conformationally constrained peptide mimetics. 

Combinatorial synthesis on solid supports is usually carried out by using either the parallel synthesis (see section 6.2.1) or the Furka split and mix procedures (see section 6.2.2). The precise method and approach adopted when using these methods will depend on the nature of the combinatorial library being produced and also the objectives of the investigating team. However, in all cases it is necessary to determine the structures of the components of the library by either keeping a detailed record of the steps involved in the synthesis or giving beads a label that can be decoded to give the structure of the compound attached to that bead (see section 6.3). The method adopted to identify the components of the library will depend on the nature of the synthesis. 

In this chapter we will discuss current approaches for analytical characterization of combinatorial libraries in a pharmaceutical industry environment. Recently, several analytical groups have presented very similar strategies for analysis of libraries [7-9]. As will be shown later, the key to successful analytical characterization of a combinatorial library is to perform analytical and chemical work in parallel with the library development. The accumulation of data and analytical experience during this process results in an assessment of library quality with a high level of confidence, even if as little as 5-10% of the library components are analyzed. Utilization of the strategy will be demonstrated using two examples analysis of a library synthesized on a robotic station in spatially addressed format and analysis of a library synthesized in accordance with split-and-mix technology. 

All the spectroscopic approaches applied for structural characterization of mixtures derive from methods originally developed for screening libraries for their biological activities. They include diffusion-ordered spectroscopy [15-18], relaxation-edited spectroscopy [19], isotope-filtered affinity NMR [20] and SAR-by-NMR [21]. These applications will be discussed in the last part of this chapter. As usually most of the components show very similar molecular weight, their spectroscopic parameters, such as relaxation rates or selfdiffusion coefficients, are not very different and application of these methodologies for chemical characterization is not straightforward. An exception is diffusion-edited spectroscopy, which can be a feasible way to analyze the structure of compounds within a mixture without the need of prior separation. This was the case for the analysis of a mixture of five esters (propyl acetate, butyl acetate, ethyl butyrate, isopropyl butyrate and butyl levulinate) [18]. By the combined use of diffusion-edited NMR and 2-D NMR methods such as Total Correlation Spectroscopy (TOCSY), it was possible to elucidate the structure of the components of this mixture. This strategy was called diffusion encoded spectroscopy DECODES. Another example of combination between diffusion-edited spectroscopy and traditional 2-D NMR experiment is the DOSY-NOESY experiment [22]. The use of these experiments have proven to be useful in the identification of compounds from small split and mix synthetic pools. 

The combinatorial approach that was pursued in search of an antiasthma drug based on a split-and-mix strategy [92] as a practical use of the operational principle of parsimony was to get the most with the least in this case, to get 343 different types of variants in only 21 reaction steps. Scheme 1-17 sketches... 

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