ReviewFoundationIndustrial medicinal chemistry insights: neuroscience hit generation at Janssen

•Modern medicinal Chemistry is highly multidisciplinary.•Chemistry can provide drug discovery innovation in many ways.•A dedicated team was established to explore new areas and hit generation.•Impact over many areas including fragment screening, novel synthesis, delivery.

The role of medicinal chemistry has changed over the past 10 years. Chemistry had become one step in a process; funneling the output of high-throughput screening (HTS) on to the next stage. The goal to identify the ideal clinical compound remains, but the means to achieve this have changed. Modern medicinal chemistry is responsible for integrating innovation throughout early drug discovery, including new screening paradigms, computational approaches, novel synthetic chemistry, gene-family screening, investigating routes of delivery, and so on. In this Foundation Review, we show how a successful medicinal chemistry team has a broad impact and requires multidisciplinary expertise in these areas.