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Drug discovery is a long and challenging process, which may take up to fifteen years of experimentation and clinical trials, and several billion dollars in various expenses to bring a successful drug to patients. The process can be roughly divided into three stages: 1) biology research and early drug discovery; 2) preclinical drug development; and 3) clinical trials.

In order to start a drug discovery program, at the first stage, scientists study biological processes to come up with proper understanding of the underlying causes of a particular disease. Once drivers of the disease are known, scientists can select specific biological targets -- typically proteins involved in a disease-causing biological process.

I decided to write this post because I needed to share my feelings for the last 56 days. Of course, I did not experience as much as those who were in the hot areas or took the arms to defend Ukraine, but possibly my personal story might still be interesting to the readers (sorry for the long read with a little bit too much personal touch).

We, at Enamine, have united to resist at our level the Russian invasion. We help to acquire non-lethal military aid to enhance the defense of Ukraine, provide medical supplies to the hospitals, provide sponsorship for science and education in Ukraine, and help our employees scattered by war across Ukraine and abroad. Our own funds are limited as we have had to put on hold most of our projects and we will greatly appreciate your donations, which we will immediately use for the urgent needs of today! This is the most direct help to Ukraine.

Dear Customers, Dear Colleagues, Dear Friends,

The war in our country lasts more than 10 days. We have put on hold most of our operations in Kyiv and ask our customers to wait until this situation is resolved. We thank all of you for your patience. During this time, we have been able to estimate our resources, capabilities, and plan next steps to be done. Now I would like to highlight some of them:

Russian aggression continues with more force and they continue killing civilians (at least 200 killed only today officially, and who knows how many more). Enamine is forced to adjust schedules of operations, please, support our fight for our lives.

As I already wrote in my previous post , we at Enamine are constantly working on extending our REAL concept (where REAL is for REadily AccessibLe compounds). Basically, this concept allows for the generation of a virtual chemical space based on the experimentally validated synthetic accessibility. Until now the REAL Space has comprised 15.5 billion make-on-demand molecules and is currently the largest offer of commercially available compounds. It was shown that this chemical space is especially useful in combination with high-throughput virtual screening techniques (see Nature 2019, 566, 224–229 and Nature 2020, 580, 663–668 ); there is also a number of other ways to access it.