Small molecule lead generation processes for drug discovery

In response to the growing economic pressure to accelerate drug discovery processes, there have been numerous reports of attempts to improve the quality of leads through computational methods and combinatorial chemistry. With the reports of drug-likeness concepts and metrics, there has been a substantial increase in awareness of the types of molecules-that are likely to be useful leads for drug discovery. The concepts of greater drug-likeness are used routinely to refine compound library designs for lead generation. Challenges still remain to develop chemistry amenable to the introduction of multiple diversity components while still creating molecules of lead-like and drug-like properties. Despite the common capability to synthesize and screen thousands of molecules, the current focus has shifted to smaller libraries targeted with greater computational sophistication according to putatively smarter target-drug premises. The need to target the right drug-like lead generation library will only grow in importance in order to exploit the information advantage of the chemical genomics approach. Organizations that develop efficient lead generation capabilities will likely find increased competitive advantage in the drug discovery field.