Accelerate Your Science: Direct-to-Biology Strategies in Medicinal Chemistry

Abstract

Direct-to-biology (D2B) is a powerful strategy that accelerates early drug discovery. It enables compounds to be synthesized in miniaturized formats and evaluated directly as crude reaction mixtures. This bypasses the need for purification during the initial design-make-test cycle. Advances in robust synthetic methodologies, automation, reaction miniaturization, and biological screening have transformed D2B from a proof-of-concept approach into a versatile medicinal chemistry platform. This platform is applicable to fragment optimization, covalent ligands, macrocycles, proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs), molecular glues, and cellular phenotypic screening. This perspective focuses on the synthetic transformations, assay technologies, and platform implementations that drive modern D2B workflows. It emphasizes reaction robustness, assay compatibility, and practical implementation. Analysis of the current literature revealed that D2B is more governed by reaction reliability than synthetic diversity. Amide coupling and click chemistry dominate reported workflows, while more complex transformations remain underexplored. We discuss the complementary strengths and limitations of biochemical, biophysical, and cellular readouts, identify current bottlenecks in reaction scope and data management, and highlight emerging opportunities arising from reaction miniaturization, machine learning, automated experimentation, and advanced synthetic methodologies. Rather than replacing conventional medicinal chemistry, D2B fundamentally shifts experimental effort from purification toward early biological validation and is poised to become an integral component of future medicinal chemistry workflows.