The 20th Anniversary of Pharmaceuticals-Design of Potential Drugs by Modification of Natural Products

Dear Colleagues,

Natural products are considered a rich source of therapeutic agents. They are also strategic in drug discovery programs, enabling the development of new and more effective lead compounds and contributing to addressing significant economic and societal challenges. Compared to synthetic molecules, natural products have the unusual features of structural diversity and complexity including the presence of many stereogenic centers and a lower number of nitrogen or halogen atoms. Substances deriving from natural sources usually are good lead compounds but are unlikely to meet the demands for druggability, suffering from various deficiencies or shortcomings. Therefore, it is beneficial or even necessary to modify and optimize these structural phenotypes.

The use of natural products as scaffolds for modification is a good approach to drug discovery and development. The structural modification of natural products is intended to increase potency and selectivity, improve physico-chemical, biochemical and pharmacokinetic properties, eliminate or reduce side effects of novel drugs, and attain intellectual properties.

Despite the many limitations associated with natural products, the various means of modification of their structure may lead to the discovery of a novel drugs. They include not only classically applied total synthesis, semisynthetic modifications, SAR-based modifications, or even a single atom alteration, but also many more approaches, which are presented below. Thus, this Special Issue invites all researchers and clinicians to publish works concerning the following and related fields:

1./ Strategies of simplification of natural drug structure.

2./ Multi-dimensional optimization of natural drugs.

3./ Reduction in the number of chiral centers.

4./ Manipulations increasing natural drug activity and selectivity.

5./ Improvement of natural drug pharmacological properties.

6./ Metabolomics in drug design.

7./ Late-stage modification of complex structures.

8./ Utilization of biosynthetic engineering.

9./ Genetic engineering in drug development.

10./ Combinatorial chemistry techniques.

11./ Fragment-binding methodology.

Prof. Dr. Paweł Kafarski
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. Pharmaceuticals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2900 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.

• natural drugs as templates
• drug structure optimization
• natural product structure simplification
• metabolomics
• system biology in drug design 
• biosynthetic engineering
• large-stage modifications