Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry, 4th Edition
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Medicinal Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2026 | Viewed by 2667
Editor
2. Institute of Chemistry, University of Silesia, Szkolna 9, 40-007 Katowice, Poland
Interests: medicinal chemistry; drug design; structure–activity relationships; pharmaceutical analysis; polymorphism; drug bioavailability; ADME; nanoparticles; nanoformulations; controlled/targeted delivery
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We announce with great pleasure the fourth edition of “Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry, 4th Edition”.
Heteroatoms constitute a very common fragment of several active pharmaceutical ingredients, as well as excipients; from the point of view of significance, it is all the same if these are isosterically/bioisosterically replaced carbons/carbon substructures in aliphatic structures or real heterocycles. Many heterocyclic scaffolds can be considered as privileged structures. Most frequently, nitrogen heterocycles or various positional combinations of nitrogen atoms, sulphur, and oxygen can be found in five- or six-membered rings. According to statistics, more than 85% of all biologically active chemical entities contain a heterocycle. This fact reflects the central role of heterocycles in modern drug design. The application of heterocycles provides a useful tool for the modification of solubility, lipophilicity, polarity, and hydrogen bonding capacity of biologically active agents, which results in the optimization of the ADME/Tox properties of drugs or drug candidates. The increasing presence of various heterocycles in drugs is related to advances in synthetic methodologies, such as metal-catalyzed cross-coupling and hetero-coupling reactions, that allow rapid access to a wide variety of functionalized heterocycles. On the other hand, many heterocyclic lead compounds were isolated from natural resources, and their structures subsequently simplified and modified by medicinal chemists. Thus, heterocycles are of critical importance to medicinal chemists because they are integral in expanding the available drug-like chemical space and drive more effective drug discovery programmes. Medicinal chemistry is “a chemistry-based discipline, also involving aspects of biological, medical, and pharmaceutical sciences” and “concerned with the invention, discovery, design, identification, and preparation of biologically active compounds, as well as the study of their metabolism, the interpretation of their mode of action at the molecular level, and the construction of structure–activity relationships”, this Special Issue of Molecules titled “Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry, 4th Edition” is devoted to the following research topics focused on heterocycles: (i) synthesis and analysis; (ii) natural compounds; (iii) carbohydrates; (iv) drug design; (v) in silico investigations; (vi) biological screening; (vii) chemical biology and biological chemistry; (vii) biomaterials; and, in general, other topics related to heterocycles.
Prof. Dr. Josef Jampilek
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- drugs
- heterocycles
- pharmacophore
- drug design
- computer study
- synthesis
- analysis
- natural compounds
- carbohydrates
- physicochemical properties
- ADMET
- biological screening
- chemical biology
- biological chemistry
- biomaterials
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Related Special Issues
- Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry in Molecules (20 articles)
- Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry II in Molecules (11 articles)
- Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry III in Molecules (14 articles)
