A CHANGING SCIENCE

Abstract

COMBINATORIAL CHEMISTRY IS alive and well, but it doesn't hold the same position that it did some 10 years ago. Conceived as heavy artillery in the fight to develop new drugs, combichem is today merely a foot soldier in that ongoing battle. Still, it's a reliable soldier that is being deployed more and more effectively by the pharmaceutical industry's scientists. As chemists attending the International Symposium on Advances in Synthetic, Combinatorial & Medicinal Chemistry learned, combinatorial chemistry is an indispensable tool in drug discovery. The symposium, held earlier this month in Moscow under the chairmanship of K. C. Nicolaou of Scripps Research Institute, was extensive, with almost 50 speakers and more than 1,000 attendees. While the conference covered a lot of scientific ground, one theme that ran through it was the evolution of combinatorial chemistry and the related high-throughput screening of combichem libraries to find drug candidates. In a talk about high-throughput screening, Alexander...