Practical Fragments

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 ...

False positives and artifacts are a constant source of irritation – and worse – in compound screening. We’ve written frequently about small...

Molecular complexity is one of the theoretical underpinnings for fragment-based drug discovery. Mike Hann and colleagues proposed two decad...

Plant homeodomain (PHD) fingers, despite their name, are found in nearly 300 human proteins. They are small (50-80 amino acid) domains that ...

Last week CHI’s Discovery on Target was held in Boston. This was the Twentieth Anniversary edition, though oddly last year also claimed to...

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) goes beyond merely inhibiting a protein; it takes a protein out of commission entirely. This is frequentl...

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

Malaria continues to be a worldwide scourge, with some quarter billion cases last year. A seventy-year-old drug called pyrimethamine target...

Practical Fragments has been on an NMR theme for the last two weeks, and this post continues that trend. One of the main barriers to entr...

Last week we highlighted a ligand-detected NMR method to measure affinities of protein-ligand interactions. That technique, R2KD, requires ...

Ligand-observed NMR is one of the most popular fragment-finding methods. Among its strengths is the ability to find extraordinarily weak f...

Stabilizing protein-protein interactions is becoming increasingly popular, and not just for PROTACs . Nearly three years ago we highlighted ...

Computational approaches to FBLD continue to gain in power. For the most part, they require significant knowledge and installation of expens...

When growing fragments into leads, the typical route is making and purifying one compound at a time. In recent years parallel synthesis and ...

Protein kinases attach a phosphate group onto amino acid side chains in proteins. Phosphorylation regulates myriad aspects of cell signaling...

Earlier this year we highlighted the growth of the Chemical Probes Portal , a free website that profiles more than 500 small molecules targ...

We're at the midpoint of the year but there is still at least one more good conference in 2023, and 2024 is shaping up to be even better...

Roughly speaking there are three ways to advance fragments to leads: growing, linking, or merging. Growing is the most common , but as the n...