Chirality in Drugs and Drug Candidates

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last several years, the relationship between chirality and therapeutic activities has been of increasing importance in the drug discovery pipeline. Chirality is ubiquitous in biological systems, and can therefore have a key influence on drug pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, and toxicity. Chirality can now be considered one of the major topics in the design, discovery, synthesis, development, evaluation, and marketing of new drugs, both for human and veterinary use. In addition to the increase of chiral drugs in the market, the relevance of enantioselective studies boosts each year due to advantages in potency, efficacy, selectivity, and safety associated with the use of single enantiomers. The advances in enantioselective synthesis as well as enantioseparation methodologies aligned to the stricter requirements from regulatory authorities to patent new chiral drugs led to increased research in this field.

This Topical Collection invites critical reviews, original research articles and other formats with comprehensive theoretical and experimental details focused on all aspects of chirality involved in drugs and drug candidates. This Topical Collection has the broad goal of illustrating recent and future trends in the development of successful chiral drugs and the search for new promising chiral drug candidates. Topics include the discovery, design and development of new chiral leads as well as synthetic and natural chiral drugs; chiral recognition studies; enantioselective synthesis; enantiomeric resolution; chiral drug analysis; stereochemical elucidation; and enantioselective studies on drug and drug candidate pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, toxicity, and environment.

Dr. Maria Emília De Sousa
Dr. Carla Fernandes
Collection Editors

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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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. Drugs and Drug Candidates is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). 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.