Bioisosteric Replacements in Drug Design - New Developments in Medicinal Chemistry - page 213

task and many molecular properties should be considered. In order to simplify this
process, some strategies can be used intending to support the decision of choosing
the most relevant interchangeable fragments (Fig. 1 ).
Figure 1: Kind of strategies used to identify bioisosteric replacements in Medicinal Chemistry.
One approach would be the search for successful bioisosteric replacements
described in the literature. The literature search can provide a high degree of
information about specific pairs of bioisosters that could be applied to novel
molecular scaffolds [7]. Nevertheless, the consideration of a pair of bioisosters
discovered for a specific molecular scaffold is not a guarantee of success when
other different scaffolds are studied, because the structure of each novel scaffold
attached to the molecular fragment will generate different molecular properties
when compared with the properties observed for the original scaffold described in
literature. Despite the uncertainty of the molecular properties generated by the
attachment of a molecular fragment inside a new molecular scaffold, the literature
search can provide an initial helpful step during bioisosteric replacement
procedures in order to provide a list of possible interchangeable fragments that