Application Note - Magnetic Resonance

NMR-based Fragment Screening for Drug Discovery

Fragment-based screening (FBS) has emerged over the last 15 years as a widely used alternative to high-throughput screening (HTS) for the identification of lead compounds in drug discovery.

Fragment-based screening (FBS) has emerged over the last 15 years as a widely used alternative to high-throughput screening (HTS) for the identification of lead compounds in drug discovery. It has helped to address many of the limitations of HTS, requiring significantly fewer compounds to be screened and synthesized, and results in a higher hit rate than traditional screening methods.

There are a number of biophysical methods used for fragment screening from which NMR is the most popular and reliable techniques and is used in more than 50% of fragment screening campaigns. NMR is ideally suited for detecting low affinity ligands in primary screens. In addition, screening by NMR allows quality control of the screening library which makes NMR superior to other methods. However, a drawback is the number of spectra generated, sometimes in the 100s or 1000s, which must be analyzed manually in parallel by a trained operator – a time-consuming, labor-intensive activity that creates a substantial bottleneck in the process.

In this webinar, Stefan Jehle, Ph.D. and Pavel Kessler, Ph.D. from Bruker BioSpin will outline how Bruker’s TopSpin software, together with a newly launched FBS tool, can help overcome this stumbling block by facilitating the workflow, improving efficiency and minimizing human error.