Introduction

Introduction

Traditionally, to make a drug, natural products were synthetically modified in order to mimic biological molecules. However, n atural compounds are highly diverse, which makes isolating, screening and optimizing these compounds a very resource and time consuming process. Hence, synthesizing a single lead compound with the traditional methods is a very tedious process . The difficulties posed by traditional drug design led, in part, to the development of combinatorial chemistry. In combinatorial chemistry, large numbers of molecules can be synthesized in parallel. The difference between traditional and combinatorial chemistry is summed up in figure 1 below: 

versus

Figure 1  : A schematic representation of differences between traditional and combinatorial chemistry. In traditional chemistry, a single product is produced by using different synthesis and purification techniques (on the top of the figure), whereas combinatorial chemistry relies on the production of large combination of products, such as combinations of A1 B1 to An Bn from building blocks A1 to An and B1 to Bn (shown on the bottom of the figure).

 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;"> Originally combinatorial chemistry was used to produce large number of peptides and oligonucleotides, but this field has now emerged as a valuable tool for medicinal chemists [2] <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">. Medicinal chemists can produce a vast number of lead structures at a faster pace using combinatorial strategies, which is a tremendous advantage over the traditional process of synthesizing lead compounds. Therefore, we decided to study the basics of this rapidly growing field and its evolution into dynamic combinatorial chemistry, which is a thermodynamically controlled application of combinatorial chemistry. Further, we will be discussing how DCC is being employed in identification and interrogation of biological molecules, and how these strategies can and have been used in various targeted drug therapies. We will focus on future applications of DCC in targeted or individual cancer treatments.

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