New lead generation strategies for protein kinase inhibitors - fragment based screening approaches

The protein kinase superfamily represents both an enormous opportunity and a unique challenge for drug discovery. Protein kinases play central roles in the cellular economy and it is well known that a large number of diseases involve aberrant protein kinase activity. This review discusses how fragment based screening strategies, such as virtual screening, NMR and high-throughput X-ray crystallography are being employed to identify new chemo-types to produce the next generation of protein kinase inhibitors.