Practical Fragments

Disrupting protein-protein interactions (PPIs) tends to be challenging: interfaces are often large and flat, with few deep pockets in which...

Bromodomains, epigenetic targets that recognize acetylated lysine residues, have received considerable attention from the fragment communit...

NovAliX held its fourth Biophysics in Drug Discovery meeting last week in the beautiful city of Strasbourg. This was my first time attend...

Our latest poll asked “how much structural information do you need to begin optimizing a fragment?” Over the past few weeks we received 14...

This is the last week for our poll on how much structural information you need to begin optimizing a fragment – please vote on the right-h...

The current poll on how much structural information is needed for fragment optimization is still open - if you haven't done so already...

Our latest poll asks how much structural information you need to advance a fragment (please vote on the right hand side of the page). On t...

As mentioned last week, advancing fragments in the absence of structure is a major challenge. But how much of a barrier is it really? ...

CHI’s Drug Discovery Chemistry meeting took place over four days last week in San Diego. This was easily the largest one yet, with eight t...

Compound purification can be a major hassle: separating the desired product from starting materials, reagents, and byproducts often takes f...

Earlier this year we highlighted a paper from Novartis in which ligand deconstruction was used to deconstruct an HTS hit against the epige...

Sir James Black famously said that the best way to find a new drug is to start with an existing one. A drug not only has to bind to a targe...

Practical Fragments has had quite a few posts on ligand efficiency (see here , here , and here , for starters). Ligand efficiency (LE) is ...

Computational screening continues to improve, due in part to a better understanding of the energetics of protein-ligand interactions. But ...

Last September we highlighted two papers out of Novartis in which various fragment-based methods delivered two separate series of low nano...

Among fragment-linking approaches, protein-templated reactions have a special appeal. When two fragments that bind next to one another on a...

Bromodomains , a type of functional module within proteins, recognize acetylated lysine residues in other proteins to act as epigenetic “re...

Elaborating a fragment to improve its affinity relies on the assumption that the fragment will maintain its position and orientation during...

Molecular complexity is a fundamental concept underlying fragment-based lead discovery: fragments, being simple, can bind to more sites on...