Fragment-based drug design has introduced a bottom-up process for drug development, with improved sampling of chemical space and increased effectiveness in early drug discovery. Here, we combine the use of pharmacophores, the most general concept of representing drug-target interactions with the theory of protein hotspots, to develop a design protocol for fragment libraries. The SpotXplorer approach compiles small fragment libraries that maximize the coverage of experimentally confirmed binding pharmacophores at the most preferred hotspots. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated with a pilot library of 96 fragment-sized compounds (SpotXplorer0) that is validated on popular target classes and emerging drug targets. Biochemical screening against a set of GPCRs and proteases retrieves compounds containing an average of 70% of known pharmacophores for these targets. More importantly, SpotXplorer0 screening identifies confirmed hits against recently established challenging targets such as the histone methyltransferase SETD2, the main protease (3CLPro) and the NSP3 macrodomain of SARS-CoV-2.
In a multicomponent reaction (MCR), one can create multiple new bonds in a single reaction from readily available starting materials; thus, MCRs are resource-and timeeffective and therefore economically favorable processes in diversity generation. In contrast, there are MCRs where a multifunctional building block is introduced instead of an additional diversity-holding component, and these can be derivatized using very diverse reactions post-synthetically leading to novel chemotypes. The synthetic applications of Meldrums acid are focusing primarily on reactions where it is applied as an alternative for acyclic malonic esters. However, its highly acidic character broadened its applications and made it a very useful reagent for MCRs or more precisely in tandem or domino reactions. There are numerous examples reported for the use of the alkylidene conjugates of Meldrums acid as dienophiles in hetero-Diels -Alder reactions, as well as Michael acceptors. In most cases spontaneous or concomitant post-synthetic derivatization increased its synthetic utility. This minireview gives a non-exhaustive insight into MCRs involving Meldrums acid, describing various applications in combinatorial and diversityoriented synthesis.
A high-throughput system for heterogeneous hydrogenation through the integration of a microfluidic reactor into an automated injector-fraction collector robot is described. The reduction of a small nitro compound library is used to demonstrate the high-throughput capability of the system and the results are compared to those of a batch reactor.
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