What is Fragment-Based Design?

Fragment-Based Design (FBD) is a relatively new approach for identifying ligands of protein targets. The strategy of FBD involves identifying small chemical compounds or ‘fragments’ that, owing to their size, generally bind with relatively low affinity, and then elaborating these to produce larger, higher affinity ligands (or hits). The impacts of the FBD technology and approaches being developed by the ARC CFBD will provide a significant shift in our ability to characterise interactions between molecules, which is fundamental to our understanding of mechanisms in the chemical and biological sciences, as well as the discovery and development of novel compounds.