Practical Fragments

Ivermectin is a miracle drug. It cures infections caused by several types of parasitic roundworms, including those that cause river blindnes...

As our poll last year demonstrated, there is no shortage of methods to find fragments. But that doesn’t mean new approaches aren’t welcome,...

The CHI Discovery on Target ( DoT ) meeting was held last week in Boston. More than 850 people from 24 countries attended, 75% from industry...

Migraines are the third leading cause of disability worldwide. Although the pathology is complex, blocking the interaction of calcitonin gen...

Ligand efficiency ( LE ) was proposed more than two decades ago as “a useful metric for lead selection.” The concept is simple: divide the b...

Nearly a decade ago we highlighted a paper from Astex that exhorted chemists to develop new synthetic methodologies useful for fragment-bas...

Accurately and reliably predicting fragment binding modes would be preferrable to doing messy, expensive, and sometimes tedious experimental...

Kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1 (KEAP1) binds to nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (NRF2), targeting it for degradation. Block...

The ten human fatty-acid binding proteins (FABPs) shuttle lipids around cells. As we noted several years ago, FABP4 and FABP5 are potential...

Although 2020 and 2021 were baleful exceptions, tuberculosis is normally the world’s deadliest infectious disease. The pathogen Mycobacteriu...

Last week we highlighted a new tool to computationally predict whether a molecule might aggregate, thereby causing false positives. This do...

Among the many types of artifacts that can fool screens and derail efforts to find leads, small colloidally aggregating molecules (SCAMs) a...

Three years ago we highlighted a growing debate about how and where to house crystallographic fragment data. With the recent surge in high-...

As we noted in our thousandth post , covalent drugs are becoming increasingly popular, particularly for tackling tough targets. But finding ...

For better or for worse, 2025 is half-way over. There are still some good conferences coming up, and 2026 is also starting to take shape. Se...

Driven by the spectacular success of diabetes and obesity drugs, metabolism is a hot therapeutic area. Much of the focus has been on GPCRs s...

Two weeks ago we discussed how to find ligand-binding sites in RNA. Last week we wrote about how difficult it is to find good ligands even...