Practical Fragments

Last month Practical Fragments wrote about make-on-demand libraries, such as those offered by Enamine. We’ve also written about fluorine-...

Werner syndrome helicase, or WRN, is an interesting target both for its biological mechanism and its flexible structure. Two years ago we hi...

In last week’s post we described a free online tool for predicting bad behavior of compounds in various assays. But as we noted, you often ...

Protein-protein interactions have a well-deserved reputation for being difficult to drug with small molecules. This is particularly true for...

The Royal Society of Chemistry puts out RSC Med. Chem. , and last year they asked David Rees (Astex), Anna Hirsch (Helmholtz Institute for P...

Covalent fragments provide an opportunity to both drug difficult targets and to more completely shut down targets . Success has spurred int...

In FBLD – as in most areas of research – speed and efficiency are prized. The faster you can find quality fragments, the faster you can adva...

Last week CHI held Discovery on Target – virtually of course. There were 20 tracks over three days and more than 650 attendees, down from 1...

Over the past decade, fluorine NMR has established itself as a powerful fragment-finding method due to the advantages Teddy laid out in h...

A long-running debate in the fragment world centers on the utility of “ three dimensional ” fragments. Proponents argue that these (often a...

The year ends, and with it the awkward teenage phase of the twenty-first century. As we have done since 2012 , we're using this last p...

Among fragment-finding methods , ligand-based NMR ranks near the top in terms of popularity. Of its many variations, fluorine ( 19 F) NMR...

It has been two years since we’ve had a post devoted to fluorine NMR. Though I don't share Teddy’s “ fetish ” for 19 F-based screening...

Chirality underpins all life. Nineteen of the twenty amino acids contain at least one stereocenter , as do all nucelosides, sugars, and mo...

As discussed last year, secondary binding sites on proteins appear to be quite common. Some of these sites have no functional relevance, b...

Last December the first-ever  Pacifichem  symposium on FBLD was held in Honolulu. Two of the organizers, Martin Scanlon and Ray Norton, inv...