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0:00
Today I'm going
to tell you about an approach
to drug discovery called
fragment-based lead discovery,
which has really started
coming to preeminence
in the past decade or so.
0:11
My presentation is in three parts.
The first is an
introduction to the concept
of fragment-based lead discovery
as well as some of the problems
that can arise.
And then I'm going to tell you
about methods to find, as well
as evaluate fragments, and close
by giving you a few examples
of how this has been
successfully applied
as well as for other resources.
0:34
A prior talk in the
series was devoted
to high throughput screening.
And you can think about
high throughput screening
as trying to guess a word by
making all possible combinations
of letters.
And if you screen through
enough word combinations,
you'll eventually be able
to discover your ligand.
In the case of
fragment-based approaches,
rather than trying to explore all
possible combinations of say, six
letters, you would look for
individual word fragments,
for example, a LIG and
an AND, and then link
those together to find your ligand.
Or, more commonly, you might find
a single-word fragment, say a LIG,
and then grow that letter by
letter into your final ligand.
1:23
To understand why this
process is more efficient,
it helps to think of Scrabble.
Those of you who
are serious players
will know that there are
exactly 96 two-letter words
that are permissible.
However, if you add one letter,
the number of possibilities
increases by more than
an order of magnitude.
