The Significance of Chirality in Drug Design and Development

Proteins are often enantioselective towards their binding partners. When designing small molecules to interact with these targets, one should consider stereoselectivity. As considerations for exploring structure space evolve, chirality is increasingly important. Binding affinity for a chiral drug can differ for diastereomers and between enantiomers. For the virtual screening and computational design stage of drug development, this problem can be compounded by incomplete stereochemical information in structure libraries leading to a "coin toss" as to whether or not the "ideal" chiral structure is present. Creating every stereoisomer for each chiral compound in a structure library leads to an exponential…