Chelator Fragment Library
The principles of metal chelation provide significant opportunities for drug design that go beyond traditional notions of chelation as metal sequestration and elimination. Exploring these other possibilities could lead to pharmacological interventions that alter the concentration, distribution, or reactivity of metals in targeted ways for therapeutic benefit. A good example is fragment-based lead design (FBLD) that has been used to identify new metal-binding groups for metalloenzyme inhibitors. This and other approaches exploit the presence of the metal ion in these enzymes for the development of synthetic small molecules with therapeutic potential.