The application of multi-component reactions in drug discovery

Multi-component reactions (MCRs) enable the facile, automated and high throughput generation of small organic molecules. MCRs have been used to create diversity oriented and biased combinatorial libraries, to accomplish the synthesis of highly complex natural products as well as for the large-scale production of drug candidates. This provides medicinal chemists with a powerful tool to create novel chemical diversity, matching the space of biological targets with relevant chemistry. The discovery of novel MCRs has become an increasingly active area of research, yielding novel chemical scaffolds for drug discovery efforts.