Fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) has emerged in the past decade as a powerful tool for discovering drug leads. FBDD has played a role in discovery of at least 30 drugs that are in various stages of clinical development, and practitioners of FBDD can be found throughout the world in both academia and industry. Different from HTS, FBDD finds fragment-like hits (molecular weight less than 300) that usually bind with low affinity; therefore, sensitive detection methods are required, such as sensitive biophysical techniques: X-ray crystallography, NMR, Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR), or mass spectrometry. This strategy offers several attractive features compared with traditional HTS or virtual screening, including higher hit rate, higher binding efficiency, and providing multiple starting points for further structural optimizations. In addition, because of the exponentially growing amount of information about one certain target, the effective utilization of bioinformatics and chemoinformatics is expected to contribute markedly toward the discovery of new drugs.

The TargetMol’s Fragment Library collects 246 fragment-like small molecules for drug discovery.