New Approach May Accelerate Drug Discovery

To develop new drugs, chemists often make many versions of a compound and then select the one that works the best. Scientists recently created a toolkit of chemical reagents that can accelerate the process of synthesizing heterocycles, which are found in many drugs and are a challenge to modify. Researchers discovered that they could use zinc-based salts to attach different modifying molecules to specific heterocycle sites. These reagents make up the new toolkit and may help chemists speed drug development and reduce its cost.

Source: NIGMS Biomedical Beat - December 20, 2012 Category: Research Source Type: news