ABSTRACT
Pharmaceutical research is considered to be a slow process. Generally, thousands of new compounds need to be prepared to find a new drug and their conventional one-by-one synthesis as well as their one-by-one testing was very tedious, time consuming and expensive. When one compares the production of new compounds – before the eighties – to automated industrial manufacturing of other items and the
extensive application of production lines, the backwardness of synthetic technologies becomes quite obvious. This situation was changed dramatically by new combinatorial synthetic methods introduced in the eighties. These methods initiated a revolution, and radically changed our theory and practice in designing and preparing new substances for pharmaceutical research and other applications. The new way of thinking expanded very quickly and contributed to the foundation of a rapidly growing new scientific field, Combinatorial Chemistry. In addition to the new synthetic methods, combinatorial chemistry also comprises the new and very efficient high throughput screening (HTS) methods. This chapter, however, is devoted only to description of the synthetic methods and the deconvolution strategies.
