Practical Fragments

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...

Last week we highlighted work suggesting that small molecule binding sites in RNA are most likely to be found in complex structures. A new ...

Most drugs bind to proteins, but RNA provides many interesting targets. Unfortunately, finding drug-like small molecules that bind to RNA is...

Back in 2012 we wrote about GDB-17, a database of possible small molecules having up to 17 carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and halogen at...

At FBLD 2024 , Frank von Delft (Diamond Light Source) announced the ambitious goal of taking a 100 µM binder to a 10 nM lead in less than a ...

At the Drug Discovery Chemistry meeting last month chemist John Taylor described efforts against the oncology target RAS. This story was re...

Last week we highlighted a protein-detected NMR method that does not require expensive and sometimes difficult isotopic labeling of protein...

Protein-detected NMR was the first practical approach for finding fragments , and as we noted last week some still consider it the gold sta...

Last week’s CHI Drug Discovery Chemistry (DDC) meeting was held as usual in San Diego. More than 850 people attended, 96% in person, with 7...

Protein kinases have proven to be a fruitful class of targets, as evidenced by more than 80 FDA-approved drugs, five of which came from fra...

A few months ago we highlighted work out of AstraZeneca detailing how to build a covalent fragment library. One of the design features was ...

Two years ago today, Practical Fragment$ launched  a line of non-fungible tokens. Unfortunately, the NFT craze didn't last much longer t...

Membrane proteins make up roughly a quarter of human proteins, including many important drug targets. Biophysical methods for fragment scree...

Cancer cells are known for growing and multiplying quickly, and to do so they need to produce large amounts of protein. The rate determining...

With increased throughput and reliability of biophysical and other methods , finding fragments against most targets is now fast and easy. Ad...