The Prestwick Chemical Library (R), A Valuable Tool for Screening

The discovery of novel drug molecules is a long, risky, and costly process and constant efforts are undertaken in order to optimize this task. The use of smart and focused chemical libraries has proven its efficiency for hit identification during early drug discovery. The Prestwick Chemical Library ® (PCL) is a product arising from medicinal chemistry expertise comprising currently 1280 off-patent drugs, thus presenting a large degree of chemical and pharmacological diversity within a relatively small number of compounds. The PCL was designed to reduce the risk of "low quality" hits and the cost of the initial screening and may be used for a) assay validation; b) finding hits for a new optimization program; c) repurposing/repositioning; d) finding modulators of stem cell differentiation. Diversity in terms of chemical structure and biological activity will be illustrated and discussed in the poster. Drug repurposing examples and successful screening results will be also reported. The PCL comes in different formats with a fully-annotated database which was recently updated. Numerous publications refer to the PCL for 10+ years.