Novel Reagent Space: Identifying Unorderable but Readily Synthesizable Building Blocks

Drug discovery building blocks available commercially or within an internal inventory cover a diverse range of chemical space and yet describe only a tiny fraction of all chemically feasible reagents. Vendors will eagerly provide tools to search the former; there is no straightforward method of mining the latter. We describe a procedure and use case in assembling chemical structures not available for purchase but that could likely be synthesized in one robust chemical transformation starting from readily available building blocks. Accessing this vast virtual chemical space dramatically increases our curated collection of reagents available for medicinal chemistry exploration and novel hit generation, almost tripling the number of those with 10 or fewer atoms.