Physicochemical property profiles of marketed drugs, clinical candidates and bioactive compounds

We performed a comparison of several simple physicochemical properties between marketed drugs, clinical candidates and bioactive compounds using commercially available databases (GVKBIO, Hyderabad, India). In contrast to previous studies this comparison was performed at the individual target level. Confirming earlier studies this shows that marketed drugs have, on average and taken as a single set, lower physicochemical property values than the corresponding clinical candidates and bioactive compounds but that there is considerable variation between drug targets. This work complements earlier studies by using a much larger annotated dataset and confirms that there is a shift in physicochemical properties for targets with launched drugs and clinical candidates compared to bioactive compounds. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.