Virtual High-Throughput Screening (vHTS)

Virtual High-Throughput Screening (vHTS). Pharmaceutical companies are always searching for new leads to develop into drug compounds. One search method is virtual high-throughput screening. In vHTS, protein targets are screened against databases of small-molecule compounds to see which molecules bind strongly to the target. If there is a “hit” with a particular compound, it can be extracted from the database for further testing. With today’s computational resources, several million compounds can be screened in a few days on sufficiently large clustered computers. Pursuing a handful of promising leads for further development can save researchers considerable time and expense. ZINC is a good example of a vHTS compound library.