Librarians, crystal structures and drug design

Abstract

There are now 355,000 published crystal structures of organic and metal-organic compounds, all of which have been acquired, validated, chemically annotated and organised for searching in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). The CSD is used in rational drug design and is beginning to answer important questions relevant to the formulation of pharmaceutical active ingredients. The value and credibility of this research are ultimately dependent on the accuracy and completeness of the underlying crystal-structure data.