Nanomedicine & Women’s Health

Medicinal Chemistry Current Approaches to Drug Discovery for  Cancer and Tropical Diseases

 The remarkable changes in technological and scientific developments in the past years have dramatically changed the pharmaceutical innovation process. Well-established strategies, such as high-throughput screening (HTS), have progressively been applied in association with novel techniques founded on genomics and proteomics, molecular and structural biology and molecular modeling. Altogether, these fields have provided outstanding advances for our comprehension of the fundamental cellular and molecular mechanisms of diseases in addition to enabling important progress in the technological arsenal used in drug discovery. Combined with novel methods in organic synthesis, such as combinatorial chemistry, the forefront approaches have built a novel paradigm in the research-based pharmaceutical industry.

Evolving paradigm, which has its roots attached to the recent advances in medicinal chemistry, molecular and structural biology, has unprecedentedly demanded the development of up-to-date computational approaches, such as bio- and chemo-informatics. These tools have been pivotal to catalyzing the ever-increasing amount of data generated by the molecular sciences, and to converting the data into insightful guidelines for use in the research pipeline. ligand- and structure-based drug design have emerged as key pathways to address the pharmaceutical industry’s striking demands for innovation. These approaches depend on a keen integration of experimental and molecular modeling methods to surmount the main challenges faced by drug candidates’ in vivo efficacy, pharmacodynamics, metabolism, pharmacokinetics and safety.

The novel scientific drug discoveries and technological advances are incorporated into the field due to the constant evolving of drug development. More efficient organic synthesis methods, chemical biology approaches and bio- and Chemoinformatics strategies have dramatically changed the process by which an initial hit is converted into a marketable drug. In part, this can be attributed to the expansion of the field towards novel therapeutic areas that are at the limits of the science and technology available today. Indeed, Present Modern strategies are strongly dependent on the high-quality interplay between the basic research originating from research institutions and academia and the Research & Development(R&D) expertise coming from industry.

In this context, multidisciplinary and integrated approaches are indispensable. Research facilities able to perform experimental and computational studies to evaluate pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics are greatly needed to identify molecules with a high potential to become drug candidates. This scenario demands a steady input from several areas of the chemical sciences, such as organic, medicinal chemistry, and biological chemistry, which stand at the frontier of the current drug R&D model. The integration of these disciplines in well-structured and consistent research projects is critical for developing promising drug candidates for treating critical conditions such as cancer and other topical diseases.