Medicine. Chemistry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Medicine. Chemistry - Essay Example The hits come from natural sources, such as plants, animals, or fungi. They can also form synthetic sources, such as historical compound collections and combinatorial chemistry. Combinatorial chemistry involves the rapid synthesis or the computer simulation of a large number of different but structurally related molecules. Synthesis of molecules in a combinatorial fashion can quickly lead to large numbers of molecules. Combinatorial chemistry has been used up in industries since the 1990s. But, combinatorial chemistry was there in 1960s when a researcher at Rockefeller University, Bruce Merrifield, started investigating the solid-phase synthesis of peptides. In the 1980s researcher H. Mario Geysen developed this technique further, creating arrays of different peptides on separate supports. Combinatorial chemistry is nowadays used by almost all the pharmaceutical industry. Some researchers have been attempting to optimize the activity profile of a compound by collecting many different but related compounds. On the other hand, advances in robotics have led to an industrial approach to combinatorial synthesis, enabling companies to routinely produce over 100,000 new and unique compounds per year. (Nelapa, Rolfle and Harper, 2006) According to Nelapa, Rolfle and Harper (2006), they say that researchers are creating a virtual library (a computational enumeration of all possible structures of a given pharmacophore with all available reactants), in order to handle the vast number of structural possibilities. This kind of a library, consist of thousands of virtual compounds. The researchers select a subset of the virtual library for actual synthesis that is based upon various calculations and criteria. In the context of luminescent materials obtained by co-deposition of elements on a silicon substrate, work has been continued by several academic groups as well as companies with large research and development programs. In order to improve the biological properties of the compound pharmacophore, the next of drug discovery undergoes synthetic modification of the hits. The quantitative structure-activity relationship of the pharmacophore play an important part in finding lead compounds, which exhibit the most potency, most selectivity, and least toxicity. Pharmacophore is a set of structural features in a molecule that is recognized at a receptor site and is responsible for that molecule's biological activity. (Nelapa, Rolfle and Harper, 2006) Pharmacophores in modern computational chemistry are used to define the essential features of one or more molecules with the same biological activity. Then, a database of diverse chemical compounds is searched for more molecules which share the same features and where these features are a similar distance apart from each other. There are several reasons to find compounds with similar biological activity to known compounds: new compounds may have beneficial effects at different doses, they may be taken up more readily by different tissues, they may have fewer deleterious effects, they may have a different biological half life, and they may be produced more efficiently. In addition, new compounds may not covered by existing patents. (Nelapa, Rolfle