The term "privileged structures" was first coined by Ben Evans DOI who recognised the potential of certain regularly occurring structural motifs as templates for derivatization to discovery novel ligands for binding to proteins. Such motifs are of course distinct from false positives molecules that appear in multiple screens due to assay interferences.

A recent publication describes a related approach looking for multi target ligands, a systematic analysis of currently available X-ray structures for compounds forming complexes with different targets DOI, by using X-ray structures they aim to avoid molecules that might interfere with the assay, some of these ligands were described in the medicinal chemistry literature, making it possible to consider additional target annotations and search for analogues. This work identified 133 unique analogue-series-based scaffolds were isolated that can serve as templates for the design of new compounds with multitarget activity.

I've added this to the Privileged Structures page of the Drug Discovery Resources.