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In search of better drugs and therapies, researchers are constantly looking for new ways to identify compounds that selectively block disease pathways. Industrial labs have relied on high-throughput screening to finger promising new molecules, but most academic labs lack the equipment and resources to scan many thousands, even millions, of compounds. For a long while this shut academic labs out of such searches, but a related technique, fragment-based drug discovery (also called fragment-based lead discovery), offers another way to develop small-molecule drugs and chemical probes for investigating biological processes. And this approach relies on instruments and expertise available at many academic institutions.
In any type of screening-based drug-discovery program, researchers examine a library of molecules that represent the gamut of chemical shapes and functional groups ...
