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2000
Volume 13, Issue 5
  • ISSN: 1386-2073
  • E-ISSN: 1875-5402

Abstract

First and foremost, I extend my sincerest appreciation to Richard B. van Breeman, the Editor-in-Chief for the past dozen years, for his hard work and dedication in heralding Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening to a highly respected place in the annals of publications related to biomolecular screening. As he aptly said in his editorial on the tenth anniversary of this publication, CCHTS occupies ‘a unique position in the peer reviewed literature by focusing on the publication of review articles and original research papers in combinatorial chemistry, high throughput screening, and the interface of these related fields. … no other journal specializes in this combination of topics'. The tireless dedication of the Regional Editors and the Editorial Advisory Board Members has contributed immensely in the global reach of CCHTS. It is Richard van Breeman who guided the journal during its formative years, and it is his leadership that made the journal what it is today. Richard has passed on the baton to me, and I am incredibly honored to carry the mantle forward to steward CCHTS to greater heights, and I would say, from a solid foundation laid by him and the founding editor, John Pezzuto. I have been a student of high throughput screening from its inception, which include my involvement in the development of the first microplate-based enzyme- and cytotoxicity assays, design of the first Zymark robotic screening platform for new lead discovery, institution of the first principles of chemical library screening for new probe discovery, and was one of the founding members, as a representative of FMC corporation, of the Society for Biomolecular Sciences. It is my sincere hope that my past experience has prepared me well to lead CCHTS to the pinnacle of journals dealing with drug discovery. Towards achieving this goal, we have expanded the publication areas of CCHTS into four clearly defined sections: Combinatorial Chemistry (with more emphasis on medicinal chemistry), High Throughput Screening, Chemoinformatics (new) and Laboratory Automation and Compound Management (new), each headed by eminently qualified, recognized experts in the respective fields. The Regional Editors from the Americas, Europe and Asia will work very closely with the Section Editors in expanding the global reach of the journal. The Section Editors will have the ultimate responsibility for their respective sections. According to Thomas Webb, Section Editor for Combinatorial/Medicinal Chemistry, CCHTS will have a much more substantial focus on the integration of medicinal chemistry into combinatorial chemistry. A major recent trend in combinatorial chemistry is the development of multidisciplinary approaches to the design and synthesis of protein target-oriented libraries, also called focused libraries. Combinatorial chemistry itself has technically evolved from a focus on large libraries prepared via solid-phase synthesis to smaller elegant libraries prepared primarily via solution-phase parallel synthesis. Compound libraries are valuable for their information content. The factors that influence the quality of the information content include relevance (target focus), structural breadth (relative diversity), applicability (physical properties), fidelity (purity) and practicality (synthetic tractability). In order to design compound libraries that are best suited to chemical biology and high throughput screening the goal should be to design and apply libraries with the highest relevance for the specific project at hand. Integration of computational and chemoinformatic methods and medicinal chemistry expertise has become essential in the library design process in order to design libraries with the greatest possible information content. The integration of these methods into the design and synthesis of high quality novel target-oriented libraries is still limited primarily only by the imagination, creativity and skill of the chemists who are involved in this part of the process. The past decade has taught us that high throughput screening technologies are a key component of effective drug discovery, but that they are put to the best advantage when combined with informatics-based technologies that establish sampling studies that optimize the likelihood of elucidating important knowledge, according to Gerry Lushington, Section Editor for Chemoinformatics. For example, combinatorial chemistry is unlikely to benefit discovery efforts if the resulting products are either indistinguishable from chemotypes for which comprehensive SAR is already available, or if the products have little chance of demonstrating pharmacologically relevant activity. Similarly, high throughput screens are most effective when they either sample diverse biologically relevant chemical space that has not yet been explored for a given target, or when they have been trained to divulge full SAR for chemical space regions that have yielded preliminarily promising but inadequately characterized bioactivity profiles. Informatics tools provide an excellent, well-validated basis for intelligent specification of chemical synthesis efforts and screening campaigns and thus play important roles in many of the steps underlying modern discovery campaigns. Careful application of existing informatics techniques and development of new algorithms that extend the accuracy and scope of in silico analysis are thus considered to be a key technology within the field of high throughput drug discovery applications, and hence the new section on Chemoinformatics.

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/content/journals/cchts/10.2174/138620710791293010
2010-06-01
2025-07-15
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  • Article Type:
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