Advances in microwave-assisted synthesis and the impact of novel drug discovery.

INTRODUCTION: Microwave (MW)-assisted synthesis of biologically active compounds has received a lot of attention in the last decades due to the advantages that such a technique offers compared to traditional heating procedures. Areas covered: The authors provide a focused review on the recent applications of this technique for drug design purposes. MW syntheses have been used for designing libraries of compounds, in combinatorial and multicomponent approaches, for lead optimization, as well as for forcing reactions which do not occur or occur in low yields using traditional methods. Expert opinion: This technique offers significant advantages over the traditional heating due to the fact that the reaction time is shortened, the possibility to have concurrent side reactions is decreased and the use of smaller amounts of polluting solvents is also reduced. However, no significant technical advances have been reported for MW-assisted devices in the last years, with the important novelty being only in the type of reactions/compounds that have been investigated and synthesized using the MW heating approach.