Disclaimer: I’m a current PhD student working on PanDDA 2 for Frank von Delft and Charlotte Deane, and sponsored by Global Phasing, and some of this is my opinion – if it isn’t obvious in one of the references I probably said it so take it with a pinch of salt

Fragment Based Drug Discovery

Principle

Fragment based drugs discovery (FBDD) is a technique for finding lead compounds for medicinal chemistry. In FBDD a protein target of interest is identified for inhibition and a small library, typically of a few hundred compounds, is screened against it. Though these typically bind weakly, they can be used as a starting point for chemical elaboration towards something more lead-like. This approach is primarily contrasted with high throughput screening (HTS), in which an enormous number of larger, more complex molecules are screened in order to find ones which bind. The key idea is recognizing that the molecules in these HTS libraries can typically be broken down into a much smaller number of common substructures, fragments, so screening these ought to be more informative: between them they describe more of the “chemical space” which interacts with the protein. Since it first appeared about 25 years ago, FBDD has delivered four drugs for clinical use and over 40 molecules to clinical trials.