Multi-Component Reactions in Drug Discovery

This presentation will discuss approaches to enhance the rate of molecular probe discovery and close the growing knowledge gap between chemical and biological space created by recent advances in systems biology. As such, multi-component reactions are advocated as tools to build proprietary compound collections, founded on the central tenets of efficiency in medicinal chemistry: (1) the potential for increased “iterative speed” around the “hypothesis–synthesis–screening” loop and (2) reduced numbers of required iterations for expedited value chain progression. Front-loading collections, in this respect, have afforded several successful “bench-to-bedside” studies with no required intermediate “scaffold hopping.” Such examples may be viewed as the original “holy grail” of combinatorial chemistry, now enabled by the exponentially increasing MCR-derived “chemical diversity space” made accessible in recent years.