2012 has been a bumper year for fragment conferences and
reviews. Starting with the Molecular Medicine Tri-Con in San Francisco, moving
south to the CHI FBDD meeting in San Diego, east to the ACS Fall Meeting in
Philadelphia, back to FBLD 2012 in San Francisco, and ending with FBDD Down Under in Melbourne, there have been plenty of opportunities to learn about the
latest work in the field. Two new books were also published, one focused particularly on crystallography and the other focused heavily on computational methods.
Practical Fragments
has highlighted one review paper, and I thought I’d mention a few others that
came out over the past year.
Chris Abell and colleagues at the University of Cambridge
published “Fragment-based approaches in drug discovery and chemical biology” in
Biochemistry. This is an excellent
and wide-ranging general review, covering theory, library design, screening
methods, fragment advancement, applications, limitations, and future trends. If
you’re new to the field or want a good refresher, this is the place to go.
Tom Blundell and coworkers, also at the University of
Cambridge, published “Biophysical and computational fragment-based approaches to targeting protein-protein interactions: applications in structure-guided drug discovery” in Quarterly Review of
Biophysics. As the title suggests, the focus is on protein-protein
interactions, but there is plenty of general interest, including lots of
unpublished data and practical suggestions.
Aaron Oakley and colleagues at the University of Wollongong,
Australia, published “Fragment-based screening by protein crystallography: successes and pitfalls” in Int. J. Mol.
Sci. This covers the entire process of crystallographic screening, from
library assembly through model building, with a nice table of recent examples
and several in-depth case studies. It also touches on potential pitfalls and
complementary fragment-finding methods.
Finally, Chungquan Sheng and Wannian Zhang of the Second
Military Medical University in Shanghai published “Fragment informatics and computational fragment-based drug design: an overview and update” in Medicinal Research Reviews. With 267
references, this is a great compilation of computational methods that touch on
numerous aspects of fragment-based lead discovery.
And with that, Practical
Fragments thanks all our readers and says goodbye to 2012. Please keep your
comments coming, and may 2013 be a splendid year!