Practical Fragments

Last week saw the first of four dedicated fragment meetings this year: Fragments 2024 , the 9 th RSC-BMCS Fragment-based Drug Discovery Me...

The winter solstice is behind us in the Northern Hemisphere, which means 2022 is rapidly drawing to a close. As we have done for the past d...

The world is understandably focused on SARS-CoV-2; see for example last week’s post . But there are many other threats out there, including...

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...

Just over a decade ago Ernesto Freire suggested that small molecules whose binding energy is dominated by the enthalpic – rather than the e...

The nuclear receptor transcription factor RORγt2 is involved in the differentiation of Th17 cells, and is thus a target for inflammatory di...

The relative importance of enthalpy versus entropy for protein-ligand interactions has been a subject of considerable attention. In a 2009 ...

The first major fragment event of 2016, CHI’s Drug Discovery Chemistry , was held last week in San Diego. FBDD was the main focus of one tr...

Dan and I both gave our thoughts on the conference last week.  But there was more than just the talks.  There were roundtables.  I chaired...

The importance of thermodynamics in drug discovery is often debated, with advocates arguing that ligands binding primarily through enthalpic...

Thermodynamics has come up several times on Practical Fragments . The binding of a ligand to a protein can be dissected into enthalpic and e...

I recently returned from Philadelphia, where the American Chemical Society held its 244 th national fall meeting. As always this was a ma...

Practical Fragments recently discussed binding kinetics , and that got me wondering whether any fragments have slow off-rates. Turns out so...

Linking two fragments together to achieve a boost in potency has been done a number of times (see here , here , here , and here ), though it...