Celerino Abad - Zapatero Are SAR tables obsolete ?

Perhaps it is because I am not a professional medicinal chemist, or possibly it is because I am a person that prefers the visual presentation of data as opposed to a long list of numbers in parallel vertical columns; either way, the fact is that the conventional structure–activity relation tables (SAR-tables), which have been and still are the essential item in most medicinal chemistry papers, are difficult for me to assimilate and might not be the best way follow the path of a drug discovery project. I can understand that nearly 100 years ago (Paul Ehrlich’s time at the beginning of the 20th century), when the main and possibly the only parameter to guide drug discovery was a measure of the activity in a biological assay, SAR tables were an effective way of condensing the two main variables: activity and full chemical structures. Those were simpler times when there was a weaker understanding of the role that the physicochemical parameters had in making a compound a successful drug. The driving force was the in vivo activity because it related to the limited synthetic compounds available for testing. Nowadays, there is enormous amount of medicinal chemistry effort that goes into producing different chemical cores and optimization of various series, without even mentioning the more extensive efforts involved in parallel synthesis of a relatively large