Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 2,242

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Quantifying the chemical beauty of drugs

Open access
Bickerton, G. Richard, Paolini, Gaia V., Besnard, Jérémy, Muresan, Sorel, Hopkins, Andrew L.·2012·Nature Chemistry

Abstract

Druglikeness is a key consideration when selecting compounds during the early stages of drug discovery. However, evaluation of druglikeness in absolute terms does not adequately reflect the whole spectrum of compound quality. More worryingly, widely used rules may inadvertently foster undesirable molecular property inflation as they permit the encroachment of rule-compliant compounds toward their boundaries. We propose a measure of druglikeness based on the concept of desirability called Quantitative Estimate of Druglikeness (QED). The empirical rationale of QED reflects the underlying distribution of molecular properties. QED is intuitive, transparent, straightforward to implement in many practical settings and allows compounds to be ranked by their relative merit. We extend the utility of QED by applying it to the problem of molecular target druggability assessment by prioritizing a large set of published bioactive compounds. The measure may also capture the abstract notion of aesthetics in medicinal chemistry.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/nchem.1243

Cites

7 of 7 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 7 references

Cited by

See all 2,242

Metadata

Authors
Bickerton, G. R., Paolini, G. V., Besnard, J., Muresan, S., & Hopkins, A. L.
Venue
Nature Chemistry
Published
2012-01-24
Volume
4
Issue
2
Pages
90-98
ISSN
  • 1755-4330 (ISSN-L)
  • 1755-4349
OpenAlex
W2034549041
Cited by
2,242
References
7
FWCI
51.25
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Quantifying the chemical beauty of drugs. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nchem.1243
The paper
Bickerton, G. R., Paolini, G. V., Besnard, J., Muresan, S., & Hopkins, A. L. (2012). Quantifying the chemical beauty of drugs. Nature Chemistry. https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1243

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.