Four disruptive strategies for removing drug discovery bottlenecks.

Drug discovery is shifting focus from industry to outside partners and, in the process, creating new bottlenecks. Technologies like high throughput screening (HTS) have moved to a larger number of academic and institutional laboratories in the USA, with little coordination or consideration of the outputs and creating a translational gap. Although there have been collaborative public-private partnerships in Europe to share pharmaceutical data, the USA has seemingly lagged behind and this may hold it back.

Prediction of HPLC conditions using QSPR techniques: an effective tool to improve combinatorial library design.

The purification and characterization of compounds resulting from parallel synthesis or combinatorial chemistry has not yet been optimized to operate as a completely automated high-throughput process. Liquid chromatography/mass spectroscopy (LC/MS) is most commonly employed to carry out the characterization and identification of combinatorial compounds. This desired level of automation can only be accomplished if the separation conditions for every compound in the combinatorial array are known prior to the analysis.

Conditional probability: a new fusion method for merging disparate virtual screening results.

This paper introduces a new consensus scoring approach for merging the results of different virtual screening methods based on conditional probabilities. The technique is experimentally evaluated using several ligand-based virtual screening methods and compared to two variations of the established Sum-rank fusion method where it performs as well or better than the Sum-rank methods. Our experiments confirm that consensus scoring increases the number of active compounds retrieved with respect to the best individual methods on average.