Combinatorial Chemistry And Library Design

The invention of combinatorial chemistry in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the development of a wide variety of automated methods for chemical synthesis [Terrett 1998; Lebl 1999]. These methods range from complex robots designed for the synthesis of large combinatorial libraries to “low-tech” equipment that enables basic functions such as heating or separation to be applied to a small number of samples. The common feature of these techniques is that they enable tasks previously applied on a molecule-by-molecule basis to be applied to many molecules simultaneously, greatly increasing the rate at which new chemical entities can be made. The early work in combinatorial chemistry was driven by the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, but there is now much interest in automated synthesis techniques in other areas of chemistry such as materials science [Xiang et al. 1995; Danielson et al. 1997].