Over recent years, an industry of compound suppliers has grown to provide drug discovery with screening compounds: it is estimated that there are over 16 million compounds available from these sources. Here, we review the chemical space covered by suppliers' compound libraries (SCL) in terms of compound physicochemical properties, novelty, diversity, and quality. We examine the feasibility of compiling high-quality vendor-based libraries avoiding complicated, expensive compound management activity, and compare the resulting libraries to the ChEMBL data set. We also consider how vendors have responded to the evolving requirements for drug discovery.

Drug discovery uses both natural product sources and synthetic organic chemistry to provide suitable starting points for further optimization. Producing such compounds in a time‐, quality‐, and cost‐efficient manner has become one of the most important applied tasks of the chemical sciences. Similarly, drug discovery has had an impact on the direction of synthetic organic chemistry. In their provide An appraisal of the relationship between synthetic chemistry and early drug discovery, along with a discussion on key concepts such as diversity‐, biology‐, and lead‐oriented syntheses is provided in the Review article by O. Grygorenko and D. Judd et al. on page 1196 ff.

Gastric and colorectal cancer models are essential for the advancement of precision medicine discovery and development. 2D attached monolayer, spheroid and organoid approaches have all been used in the formation of biobanks containing primary patient-derived cells. Here, we report an assessment of those procedures for a panel of nine patient-derived adenocarcinoma samples, along with the most applicable method for the bio-banking of these cell types. A live cell biobank of tumour specimens would facilitate drug discovery laboratories to evaluate drugs on the population of cell cultures, prior to the clinical phase.