Chemists cull compounds using 'intuition'

Medicinal chemists might be using far fewer parameters to choose candidate fragments for a screening collection than they think they do. Their choices can be mimicked based on just one or two properties, a team led by researchers at Swiss-headquarted pharmaceutical firm Novartis has found. And though the 19 chemists disagree widely over which fragments are desirable or undesirable, they appeared to use similar parameters for their choices. ‘This could simplify the process of creating collections of fragments in future,’ says senior author Natasja Brooijmans, now at Blueprint Medicines in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More...

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/11/drug-discovery-chemists-chemical-think-intuition-novartis