Fragment-based lead discovery

So, imagine you are trying to find a toy car in a big room full of different toys. It can be really tough to look at every single toy in the room, so you decide to break it down into smaller parts. You start by looking at the toy cars on one shelf and then move to a different shelf to check for toy cars.

This is kind of like what scientists do when they are trying to find a new medicine to treat a disease. They want to look at lots of different chemicals to see if they can find one that helps, but there are so many chemicals out there that it would take too long to look at each one individually.

So instead, they break the chemicals down into smaller parts, called fragments. They look at the fragments individually to see if any of them could be useful for making a new medicine.

Once they find a helpful fragment, they can use that as a starting point to build a whole medicine around it. It's kind of like using the wheels of a toy car to build a whole new car.

This process is called fragment-based lead discovery, and it can help scientists find new medicines faster and more efficiently.