Pure and Applied Chemistry

Abstract: With the emergence of high-throughput screening in the pharmaceutical industry over a decade ago, synthetic chemists were faced with the challenge of preparing large collections of molecules to satisfy the demand for new screening compounds. The unique exploratory power of multicomponent reactions such as the Biginelli three-component reaction was soon recognized to be extremely valuable to produce compound libraries in a time- and cost-effective manner. The present review summarizes synthetic advances from our laboratories for the construction of Biginelli libraries via solution-and solid-phase strategies that are amenable to a high-throughput or combinatorial format.