For many years, researchers have been trying to rationally design drugs from scratch based on high-resolution three-dimensional structures of a given target molecule. Until now, however, this approach has worked only for a disappointingly small number of targets. Thus, drugs are still almost exclusively identified by screening of very large substance libraries. What has improved, however, is the speed of screening compound libraries, which may contain several million different compounds. but even with the help of recently developed high-speed and ultra-high-throughput techniques, such chemical compound libraries are very costly and expensive to screen. Maintainence and expansion of these compound libraries is demanding too.
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