This manuscript is dedicated to all people affected directly or indirectly by the COVID‐19 pandemic.Initially proposed by Bajorath and colleagues, the concept of analog series is evolving as a novel data‐driven paradigm useful in making sense of high‐throughput screening data and other large chemical libraries. This concept allows not to talk only of individual hits in a screening, but even about potential leads or families of compounds with good performance in any large‐scale testing. In this case, we have devised new statistics to identify consistently selective analog series against specific cancer cell lines; such analog series can be seen as constellations in the chemical space containing bright stars. The flexibility of the analog series can still lead to several applications. More details can be found in the Full Paper by Jesús Naveja, and José L. Medina‐Franco, please see DOI 10.1002/minf.202000061.
SAR Matrix. Shown is a small SAR Matrix (SARM) containing three analog series with structurally related cores (shown on the left with distinguishing substructures colored red). Each cell in the matrix contains a unique compound (core‐substituent combination). Cells are color‐coded by logarithmic potency values (spectrum on the right). Empty cells represent virtual compounds (non‐existing core‐substituent combinations).
Evaluating progress in lead optimization. Shown is a scatter plot comparing computationally evaluated chemical saturation and SAR progression of different analog series (dots).
