Robert A. Goodnow
SLAS Discov., 2018, 23(5), 385-386
https://doi.org/10.1177/2472555218766250

Abstract

Drug discovery scientists have made great efforts over the years to explore a maximum possible number of chemical structures against a biological target or targets of interest. The advent of automation and miniaturization has enabled significant progress in the high-throughput screening, delivery, and analysis of hundreds of thousands to millions of compounds. This journal has published numerous manuscripts that report on the efficiency of such technologies applied to screening and laboratory sciences. With increased efficiency in any process, one must consider its inputs and outputs. This special collection of SLAS Discovery focuses on DNA-encoded library technology (DELT) to shed light on the new opportunity to make available high numbers of small-molecule structures in the hit-finding process, something that has been a limiting factor in drug discovery. DELT specifically addresses the problem of exploring the interface of chemistry and biology with hundreds of millions of small molecules in an efficient manner that has been neither possible nor feasible before.