compound-triage

name	Compound Triage
description	Narrow a hit list to the compounds worth a person's bench time, and say why the rest were dropped.
category	Discovery

Compound Triage

A screen produces more hits than anybody can follow. The value of this pass is in what it removes and in the reasons it records for removing them.

When to use

• A screen or virtual screen returns a hit list.
• A series has to be narrowed before it goes to the bench.

Steps

1. Read experiments for what has been tried. Re-testing a compound already found to be an assay artefact is the commonest waste in discovery and it is entirely preventable.
2. Remove the known artefacts first — aggregators, reactive groups, assay-interference chemotypes. Removed with the reason, not silently.
3. Check the properties that decide developability, not just potency. A potent compound with no viable route to exposure is a paper, not a candidate.
4. Look for series, not singletons. A structure-activity relationship across several related compounds is evidence; a single potent hit is a lottery ticket.
5. State what would confirm each survivor, and what a human would have to do at the bench to get it.
6. Record the drops. Every removed compound gets a reason on experiments or the program row, because the next screen will surface it again.

Output

A short ranked list with what would confirm each one, and an explicit record of what was dropped and why. Nothing here asserts activity in a person; that needs wet results and the people qualified to read them.