Prodrugs: Design and Development
A special issue of Pharmaceuticals (ISSN 1424-8247). This special issue belongs to the section "Medicinal Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 November 2024 | Viewed by 485
Special Issue Editors
Interests: drug development; cancer research; cell biology; organelle targeting; metalorganics
2. School of Medicine, Union of the Colleges of the Great Lakes (UNILAGO), SJRP, São Paulo, Brazil
Interests: new drugs; drug design; drug discovery; infectious disease; medicinal chemistry
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Chemically modified drug molecules with a neglectable pharmacological activity that are transformed into the active parent drug in vivo by enzymatic reactions or under special cellular conditions are called prodrugs. The concept of the prodrug is designed to tackle several drug formulation and pharmacokinetic problems including poor solubility, low absorption, too-high or too-low lipophilicity, and poor target discrimination. As a result, every year the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves several prodrugs which account for a significant fraction (>10%) of all FDA-approved small molecules. Some recent examples are Eybelis (topical ocular hypotensive treatment, approved in 2022) and Azstarys (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder treatment, approved in 2021).
This Special Issue is dedicated to the design and development of prodrugs, the in vivo and in vitro studies as well as to the development of advanced drug-delivery systems with prodrug mechanism of action, such as prodrug-based nanoparticles. Authors are welcome to submit research papers or review articles on the topics connected with prodrug carriers, the development of not-selective prodrugs to improve drug pharmacokinetic properties, or the development of selective prodrugs activated by light, disease-specific enzymes, hypoxic/oxidative microenvironment of cancer and/or pH, etc.
Dr. Viktor Reshetnikov
Prof. Dr. Chung Man Chin
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- prodrug
- molecular modification
- disease-specific activation
- targeting
- solubility and lipophilicity adjustment
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