Pharmacophore searches that include anchors, fragments contributing above average to receptor binding, combined with one-step syntheses are a powerful approach for the fast discovery of novel bioactive molecules. Here, we are presenting a pipeline for the rapid and efficient discovery of aspartyl protease inhibitors. First, we hypothesized that hydrazine could be a multi-valent warhead to interact with the active site Asp carboxylic acids. We incorporated the hydrazine anchor in a multicomponent reaction and created a large virtual library of hydrazine derivatives synthetically accessible in one-step. Next, we performed anchor-based pharmacophore screening of the libraries and resynthesized top-ranked compounds. The inhibitory potency of the molecules was finally assessed by an enzyme activity assay and the binding mode confirmed by several soaked crystal structures supporting the validity of the hypothesis and approach. The herein reported pipeline of tools will be of general value for the rapid generation of receptor binders beyond Asp proteases.The discovery and development of novel drugs is a highly time, resource and investment-intensive undertaking with very low success rate if compared with other industrial development processes. Often it starts with a high throughput screening campaign, but the final discovery of a bioactive lead involves many different disciplines, including biochemistry, cell biology, pharmacology, structural biology and computational chemistry. Bottlenecks of early-stage discovery are often the time consuming and expensive high-throughput screening and the subsequent delineation and expansion of hits. We recently introduced a specialized pharmacophore search technology, AnchorQuery that brings interactive virtual screening of novel protein-protein interaction inhibitors to the desktop. [1,2]