[Translational research and Cancer Plan]. / Recherche translationnelle et plan Cancer.

The French Cancer Plan 2003-2007 has made translational research central to its research programme, to ensure the care-research continuum and the quickest application possible for the most recent discoveries, for the patients' benefit. This is a new field of research, still little-known or ill-understood. A working group, composed of physicians and researchers from academic research and industrial research, sought to define translational research in cancerology and define the issues at stake in it. Translational research needs to develop in close connection with the patients in order to enable a bi-directional flow of knowledge from cognitive research toward medical applications and from observations made on patients toward cognitive research. Placed under the aegis of the French National Cancer Institute and Leem Research, the group has put forth a strategy for implementing translational research in cancerology in France to make it attractive, competitive and efficient and to foster the development of public-private partnerships.

Combinatorial chemistry, automation and molecular diversity: new trends in the pharmaceutical industry.

Combinatorial chemistry has emerged as a set of novel strategies for the synthesis of large sets of compounds (combinatorial libraries) for biological evaluation. Within a few years combinatorial chemistry has undergone a series of changes in trends, which are closely related to two important factors in libraries: numbers and quality. While the number of compounds in a library may be easily expressed, it is a lot more difficult to indicate the degree of quality of a library. This degree of quality can be split into two aspects: purity and diversity. The changing trends in combinatorial chemistry with respect to the strategies, the technologies, the libraries themselves (numbers and purity aspects) and the molecular diversity are outlined in this paper.

Analyses of compound libraries obtained by high-throughput parallel synthesis: strategy of quality control by high-performance liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques.

The growing interest in combinatorial chemistry has led to a new source of compounds from which a large number of leads has emerged over recent years. Parallel synthesis, in particular, allows a quick production of a wide number of individual compounds. A rapid analytical control is needed to determine their quality. A strategy using automated, fast reversed-phase C18 high-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection (LC-DAD-MS) followed by atmospheric pressure chemical ionisation mass spectrometry (APCI-MS) and NMR has been developed for their characterisation and purity control. Complementary NMR analyses are done on selected compounds to provide a better structural characterisation of the expected compounds and their potential side-products. Validated libraries are then registered in ISIS databases using automated procedures.