MCR XII. Efficient Development of New Drugs by Online-Optimization of Molecular Libraries

The principles of combinatorial chemistry accelerate the development of new drugs enormously. Molecular libraries on the basis of multicomponent reactions (MCR) in liquid phase provide products of high diversity. Automated parallel synthesis and automatic analysis units (e.g. HPLC) provide the chance for optimizing the reaction conditions in an efficient way. Multi-parameter optimization by means of the genetic algorithm or other heuristics induce better yields at higher selectivity. The computer aided syntheses of molecular libraries under optimized reaction conditions with quality control results in an automaton, where the drug designer has the only but important task to choose the most useful starting compounds and thereby the molecular sub-space of a MCR.