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Nature Chemical Biology 1, 125 (1 August 2005) | doi:10.1038/nchembio0805-125

New screening tools for lead compound identification

Tomi K Sawyer

The 'thrill of victory and agony of defeat' that many Olympians have experienced in their quest for the gold finds analogy in the challenges of lead compound generation and optimization to advance drug discovery. Despite the mind-boggling tools and 'core' technologies that exploit various aspects of chemistry, biology and in silico drug design to experimentally analyze thousands to millions of small molecules from chemical libraries or collections, there are hurdles to validating true lead compounds and eliminating false positives.