ABSTRACT
A number of valid reasons have prompted the research-oriented chemical industry to invest substantial resources into the effort to dramatically increase the evaluation efficiency of new chemical entities. The objective is to optimize rapidity and cost in the early phases of the process, leading to the identification of compounds with promising properties for further development into commercial products (typically pharmaceuticals or agrochemicals). In drug discovery, the wealth of new molecular targets with therapeutic potential is bound to increase, due to the efforts to understand the mechanisms of diseases and due to the data retrieved from genomics [1, 2].
