| The spiralling cost of drug development
calls not only for political and fiscal
decisions, but also for the integration of
cost-effective technological innovations into
discovery programmes. The emergence
of miniaturised arrays designed to detect
numerous small molecule interactions with
target proteins in a single assay opens up
promising prospects for the pharmaceutical
industry. This article reviews some recent
successful attempts to develop and apply
small molecule microarrays (SMMs) to
drug discovery.
SMALL MOLECULES
AND DIVERSITY OF HTS
Small molecules, which specifically
recognise and bind to druggable sites on
proteins, appear to be the most promising
substances for developing a new generation
of effective drugs against many diseases.
High-throughput screening (HTS) of
chemical compound libraries is primordial
for the successful discovery of small
molecule drug candidates. Until recently,
HTS has been primarily used to detect
compounds that modulate a given function
of a target protein. This was a rather
laborious task that required an expensive
screening infrastructure that had to be
adapted to each drug discovery project. |
