The 20th Anniversary of Pharmaceuticals-Design of Potential Drugs by Modification of Natural Products
A special issue of Pharmaceuticals (ISSN 1424-8247). This special issue belongs to the section "Natural Products".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 August 2024) | Viewed by 2666
Special Issue Editor
Interests: medicinal chemistry; organic synthesis; biotransformations; enzyme inhibitors; organophosphonates; peptide mimetics; natural products in food
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Natural products are considered a rich source of therapeutic agents. They are also strategic in drug discovery programs, enabling the development of new and more effective lead compounds and contributing to addressing significant economic and societal challenges. Compared to synthetic molecules, natural products have the unusual features of structural diversity and complexity including the presence of many stereogenic centers and a lower number of nitrogen or halogen atoms. Substances deriving from natural sources usually are good lead compounds but are unlikely to meet the demands for druggability, suffering from various deficiencies or shortcomings. Therefore, it is beneficial or even necessary to modify and optimize these structural phenotypes.
The use of natural products as scaffolds for modification is a good approach to drug discovery and development. The structural modification of natural products is intended to increase potency and selectivity, improve physico-chemical, biochemical and pharmacokinetic properties, eliminate or reduce side effects of novel drugs, and attain intellectual properties.
Despite the many limitations associated with natural products, the various means of modification of their structure may lead to the discovery of a novel drugs. They include not only classically applied total synthesis, semisynthetic modifications, SAR-based modifications, or even a single atom alteration, but also many more approaches, which are presented below. Thus, this Special Issue invites all researchers and clinicians to publish works concerning the following and related fields:
1./ Strategies of simplification of natural drug structure.
2./ Multi-dimensional optimization of natural drugs.
3./ Reduction in the number of chiral centers.
4./ Manipulations increasing natural drug activity and selectivity.
5./ Improvement of natural drug pharmacological properties.
6./ Metabolomics in drug design.
7./ Late-stage modification of complex structures.
8./ Utilization of biosynthetic engineering.
9./ Genetic engineering in drug development.
10./ Combinatorial chemistry techniques.
11./ Fragment-binding methodology.
Prof. Dr. Paweł Kafarski
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- natural drugs as templates
- drug structure optimization
- natural product structure simplification
- metabolomics
- system biology in drug design
- biosynthetic engineering
- large-stage modifications
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