Practice of Medicinal Chemistry

This book collects in one single volume the practical aspects of Medicinal Chemistry, seen from the chemical point of view, including the wealth of information which medicinal chemists accumulate over a career, and is generally never organized and presented in coherent form in print. Emphasis is given to the daily problems met by the medicinal chemist when he deals with lead discovery and identification methodologies, with structure-activity relationship studies aimed to scale up potency and target selectivity, and when he has to confer optimal pharmaceutic properties by means of ultimate chemical modifications. These aspects are covered by: * Specific chapters devoted to the discovery of new lead compounds, including combinatorial chemistry. * Clearly written chapters on modern topics such as stereochemical aspects of drug action, the use of X-ray structures of receptors and enzymes in drug discovery, and the contribution of molecular biology to drug discovery. * Guidelines and operational strategems allowing identification of the portions of the molecule which are important for potency. * The particular emphasis given to the three-dimensional aspects of the drug-receptor interactions, to the design of peptidomimetic drugs and to the control of the agonist-antagonist transition. * Chemical solutions to solubility and to formulation problems. These sections cover perhaps the most neglected areas in medicinal chemistry books. * Development of new drugs: legal and economic aspects constitutes another important area in which chemists are almost wholly self taught following their entry into industry. Highly recommended to organic chemists entering into pharmaceutical research and to medicinal chemists in general.Wermuth, Camile G. is the author of 'Practice of Medicinal Chemistry' with ISBN 9780127446400 and ISBN 0127446400.