Small Molecules as Anticancer Drugs: Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Medicinal Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2022) | Viewed by 2877
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
There was a time in which chemotherapy, a method of removing or inhibiting the growth and proliferation of tumor cells using chemical drugs, was the only approach to anticancer drug therapy. The most critical negative feature of chemotherapy is the incapacity to differentiate between cancer cells and normal cells, leading to significant toxicity and side effects. However, over the past two decades, there has been a significant paradigm shift in cancer treatment. For example, the ABL inhibitor imatinib is considered an innovative drug that validated the concept of designing a small therapeutic molecule to treat chronic myeloid leukaemia in which the malignancy is driven by translocation BCR-BL. Imatinib was the first targeted drug approved by the FDA in 2001. In the past 20 years, there has been a significant increase in targeted drugs approved by the FDA to treat cancer. On the other hand, the drug reuse technique has become an effective alternative strategy to discover and develop new cancer drug candidates. Likewise, the identification and validation of biomarkers and drug targets associated with cancer progression present an exciting opportunity to improve the treatment of this overwhelming disease.
Dr. Mariano Martínez-Vázquez
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. Molecules is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2700 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.
Keywords
- anti-cancer natural products
- anti-tumoral synthetic compounds
- anti-tumoral nanoparticles
- small-molecule targeted drugs
- drug repurposing
