Recent trends in library design: “Rational Design” revisited

CINF 27

Dora Schnur, Computer-Assisted Drug Design, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pharmaceutical Research Institute, P.O. Box 5400, Princeton, NJ 08543-5400 and Cullen L. Cavallaro, Pharmacopeia, Inc.
Diversity has historically played a critical role in the design of combinatorial libraries, screening sets and corporate collections used for lead discovery. Large library design in the 1990's ranged from arbitrary through property based reagent selection to product based approaches. Over time, however, there has been a downward trend in library size as information about the desired targets increased due to the genomics revolution and the increasing availability of target protein structures from crystallography and homology modeling. Concurrently, computing grids and CPU clusters have facilitated the development of structure based tools that screen hundreds of thousands of molecules. Smaller “smarter” combinatorial and focused parallel libraries have replaced those un-focused large libraries in the twenty-first century drug design paradigm. While diversity still plays a role in lead discovery, target family and target specific approaches dominate current efforts in library design. This talk will highlight these library design trends and explore the use of software developed by R. Pearlman for sparse matrix library design.