Department of Chemistry, AstraZeneca Charnwood, Bakewell Road, Loughborough, LE11 5RH, UK.
Drug Discov Today. 2011 Sep;16(17-18):817-21. doi: 10.1016/j.drudis.2011.06.005. Epub 2011 Jun 15.
To an outsider, the exploration of thousands of molecules to find a small number of potential candidate drugs must appear enormously wasteful, but many medicinal chemists would defend this waste as unavoidable. Here, I provide evidence that suggests that modern medicinal chemists are overproductive in that they synthesise many more compounds than are required to achieve the objectives of the project. The difficulties encountered in finding the data for the analysis presented here prompted the design and implementation of a more rigorous approach to capture the essence of a medicinal chemistry program. The result, medicinal chemistry knowledge sharing (MeCKS), was designed to capture and communicate emerging issues and their solutions to the medicinal chemistry community.
对于门外汉来说，为了寻找少数潜在候选药物而对数千种分子进行探索，这似乎是极大的浪费，但许多药物化学家可能会为这种浪费辩护，认为这是不可避免的。在这里，我提供的证据表明，现代药物化学家的生产力过剩，因为他们合成的化合物远远超过实现项目目标所需的数量。在为分析提供数据时遇到了困难，这促使我们设计并实施了一种更严格的方法来捕捉药物化学项目的本质。其结果是，药物化学知识共享（MeCKS）旨在捕捉和交流新兴问题及其解决方案，以惠及整个药物化学领域。
