Strategies for the identification and generation of informative compound sets

Mounting pressures in pharmaceutical research necessitate ever increasing efficiency to lower cost and produce results. This is especially true in the realm of high-throughput screening (HTS) where large pharmaceutical companies historically test many hundreds of thousands of compounds in the search for new drug leads. As a result of this pressure the old mantra of "screen them all" is rapidly becoming a phrase of the past and the search for new, more efficient methods for discovering leads begins. This chapter will describe some of the methods, techniques, and strategies that have been implemented at Pharmacia that attempt to identify compounds that are likely to provide the most useful information so that one might discover solid leads rapidly.