FBDD & Molecular Design

The FBDD Literature blog is getting a bit of a makeover. One of the reasons for doing this is that since I escaped from Big Pharma my access to literature has been erratic, making it difficult to maintain the required awareness of the current literature. However, a bigger reason for the changes was to broaden the focus of the blog to include Molecular Design, which is my primary scientific interest.

There is of course a lot of molecular design in FBDD, which I like to think of as little more than a smart way to do structure-based design. Molecular design may be defined as control of properties of compounds and materials through manipulation of molecular properties. Although computational chemistry tools are very useful in molecular design, the essence of design is thinking about molecules and I don�t want people without a CompChem background to be put off by the blog having Molecular Design in its title.

There will still be plenty of fragment-based material in the blog since I will be continuing the series on screening library design which came to a halt on Easter Island a year and half ago. However, I�m also planning some posts on physicochemical properties such as logP and logD which are important in FBDD but have a much broader relevance in Drug Discovery.

A short update

I�m now back in the UK and have been catching up with a few folk. It certainly was a great trip and I�ve set up a travel blog called The Great Escape (better late than never) to share some photos. So far the first month, which included a couple of weeks in Paraguay, has been written up.

You may remember the post on SPR from a while back. It got turned into a letter to the Journal of Molecular Recognition which (to my great amusement) is treated as a publication by Google Scholar. It turned out the review that inspired the post had a few folk spitting feathers and I got the chance to join the fun. I�ve never figured out why people try to eat feathers.