Responding to the Challenge Posed by the Generic Control of Substances

November 11, 2022

Drug monitoring organizations report that new psychoactive substances continue to emerge, posing health and social threats and creating an unprecedented challenge for national and international law systems. By the time a new regulation comes into force, there are already novel drugs ready to be launched into the market. To keep pace with this ever-evolving situation, countries have introduced new types of legal responses such as generic control of substances. Screening large compound collections against these new generic definitions is a challenge for traditional search engines. New approaches like the introduction of novel homology groups and state-of-the-art Markush search technologies are emerging to address these challenges, and this paper gives examples of the successful application of such new technology.

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