Wrestling with Lipinski’s rule of 5
The chemist introduced the guidelines more than 25 years ago. Drug designers still disagree about their value.
Even Lipinski counts himself among those that don’t think the rule of 5 should be hard and fast. “I am still slightly taken aback by how some people want strict guidelines without consideration of nuance,” says the chemist, who retired from Pfizer in 2002 and is now a consultant. “At heart, I am an experimentalist, and I believe that generally, experimentation trumps calculation. So one should try hard to measure the properties of an interesting compound even if the calculations on that compound may not look too promising.”
See more about Lipinski’s rule of 5 here