title: Combinatorial chemistry, automation and molecular diversity: new trends in the pharmaceutical industry.
abstract: Combinatorial chemistry has emerged as a set of novel strategies for the synthesis of large sets of compounds (combinatorial libraries) for biological evaluation. Within a few years combinatorial chemistry has undergone a series of changes in trends, which are closely related to two important factors in libraries: numbers and quality. While the number of compounds in a library may be easily expressed, it is a lot more difficult to indicate the degree of quality of a library. This degree of quality can be split into two aspects: purity and diversity. The changing trends in combinatorial chemistry with respect to the strategies, the technologies, the libraries themselves (numbers and purity aspects) and the molecular diversity are outlined in this paper.
authors.affiliation: Synthélabo Biomoléculaire, Department of Combinatorial Chemistry, Strasbourg, France.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Van Hijfte
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Marciniak
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Froloff
mesh_terms: D001331:Automation; D015195:Drug Design; D004345:Drug Industry / Q000639:trends*