Subject: Re: Drug-like inactive molecules

From: Roger Lahana <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 09:26:02 +0200

Dear Hugo,

Thank you for your input in this debate.

Hugo Kubinyi wrote:

> from my point of view, the "most drug-like" inactive molecules should be the
> molecules listed in the WDI or in similar drug collections.

Absolutely.

> There should be at
> least one or several biological target/s for every member at which the
> respective "drug" is inactive.

Indeed. My only question was, and still is: where do you get this information on
inactivity?

> Another good source might be the literature. There are thousands of publications
> where active, less active and even inactive analogs are listed with their
> quantitative data. So what?

Literature is our most widely used source of information, as everybody else. Some of
the problems we have encountered are:
- Heterogeneous biological measurements hence impossible to compare
- different data from a paper to another on the very same compounds
- irrelevant (or useless) assays in a number of cases
- chemical series which are so restricted, so poorly diverse, that there's very few
to extract from that (who is interested by another benzodiazepine study?)

Again, my purpose is to make such inactivity information properly gathered and
organised so as scientists don't undergo again and again the painful process of
searching such data from so many sources and in so many heterogeneous forms. This is
what databases are for. Now, if you know of such a product available today, I am
happy to buy it.

Kind regards,

Roger

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Dr Roger Lahana                                          Synt:em
Vice-President R&D                     Parc Scientifique G.Besse
Computational Drug Discovery                         30000 Nimes
email: [email-masked]                            France
Tel: +33 (0)466 048 666                  Fax: +33 (0)466 048 667
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