When pursuing a single drug candidate, chemists make many molecules. Pharmaceutical companies catalog and store these compounds in collections for future screening. But in academic labs, the molecules tend to languish in chilly obscurity at the back of the laboratory freezer.“You make a bunch of things, and you test them, and then they get squirreled away, and they're all vialed up and labeled and carefully kept, but they just sit there,” says Matthew Todd, who works in drug discovery at University College London. Over time, the compounds get discarded either because they’ve degraded or because the student that made them has graduated and left the lab. “All of that work and money that was used to make the compounds go to waste,” he says.Todd, an open-source science advocate, says these compounds—which he calls “idlers”—could find new life in other labs. In a paper published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, he and his colleagues outline a way to collect and share these idlers with other scientists, along with a step-by-step guide to library generation, selection, and analysis in the paper’s supplementary information (2026, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.5c02354).Although Todd has been involved in other efforts to share compounds for specific diseases, such as malaria and COVID-19, this is the first time he’s worked on a project that isn’t aimed at a specific target. He hopes the paper will encourage other academic drug-discovery groups to make and share their own libraries of idlers, thereby creating a large compound collection.Todd acknowledges that there are a
Bethany Halford (Fri,) studied this question.