One pragmatic way to improve compound quality, while enhancing and
accelerating drug discovery projects, is the ability to access a high quality,
novel, diverse building block collection. Here, we outline general
principles that should be applied to ensure that a building block collection
has the greatest impact on drug discovery projects, by discussing design
principles for novel reagents and what types of reagents are popular with
medicinal chemists in general. We initiated a program in 2009 to address
this, which has already delivered three candidate drugs, and the success of
that program provides evidence that focusing on building block design is
a useful strategy for drug discovery.