Trends and recent technologies for physicochemical analysis in small molecule screening

Abstract

The evaluation of specificity between a candidate drug and its target molecule is an important indicator in molecular-targeted drug discovery. The physicochemical analysis technique is a powerful tool to understand this specificity. The strength of physicochemical analysis is the hit validation and lead generation of compounds selected by screening. Since each of these techniques can yield data based on unique principles, a combination of these techniques to evaluate pleiotropically allows us to adapt to other diverse targets, such as membrane proteins or protein-protein interactions. In this article, we review the recent progresses on physicochemical techniques for small molecule drug discovery, including our recent works.