Editorial [Hot Topic: New Developments in Drug and Vaccine Discoveries (Executive Editor: Aldar S. Bourinbaiar)]

This special issue of “Current Pharmaceutical Design” covers a broad range of topics with the unifying theme - novel approaches to conquer a disease and improve well-being of a patient. Most, if not all of these, are approaches that already have passed the preclinical stage and have been applied in clinical practice. In order to assemble this issue the Editor picked original investigators working all over the world in order to make it truly international and to provide a representative sample of projects that are undertaken on a global scale. The individual topics of this issue cover every major global disease. The articles in this issue are listed in the alphabetical order according to the surname of the first author. The team of Batdelger et al. [1] from Mongolia, Thailand and USA, review the current trend in therapeutic vaccines and summarize their own contribution to immunotherapy of hepatitis B and C - two most common serious, infectious diseases that affect globally over 500 million people or roughly 10% of global population. AIDS is another global disease affecting 30 million people. Armenian group of Davtyan et al. [2] describe their own approach to combat AIDS - an anti-inflammatory as well as antiviral combination therapy that they have successfully developed and applied in their own country. Kucherov et al. [3] from Belarus describe results of their drug screening effort for potential anti-HIV agents among affordable, locally-manufactured drugs that have been used for unrelated diseases. As a result they were able to discover six new compounds, three of which can be deployed immediately since they have been used safely by physicians for other clinical conditions.