Revealing New Molecular Mechanisms in Medicinal Chemistry

Dear Colleagues,

The current arsenal of US FDA-approved drugs targets nearly 1000 human and pathogen-derived biomolecules. While annual new drug approvals continue at a steady rate, with 2023 marking the greatest number of approvals in three decades, drugs with novel mechanisms of action mark only a subset of these approvals. Targeting unique processes within disease states remains crucial for combating drug resistance, therapeutic failures in patient subgroups, and stratified therapeutic efficacy. Innovative mechanism-based drug design often requires annotating previously undescribed biomolecular targets. This Special Issue in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences highlights timely mechanistic discoveries in pharmacology, regardless of disease state, in emerging drug discovery campaigns. Molecular mechanisms of medicinal chemistry are defined as the biomolecular interactions between a pharmacological lead and target that elicit the desired physiological response. This Special Issue will platform exciting breakthroughs in the development of next-generation competitive and uncompetitive modulators, allosteric and covalent inhibitors, ligands with diverse pharmacokinetics, and newly defined polypharmacologic approaches, among others. Submitted manuscripts should include a detailed mechanistic evaluation of drug action. Submissions relating to all disease states are welcome.

Dr. Margaret E. Olson
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Molecular Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. There is an Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal. For details about the APC please see here. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• pharmacology
• pharmacokinetics
• covalent
• competitive
• uncompetitive
• agonist
• antagonist
• drug development
• mechanism of action