Editorial

This second volume of the book series, Frontiers in Medicinal Chemistry contains a collection of 26 updated articles on various aspects of medicinal chemistry, which have been previously published in the top medicinal chemistry journals, including “Current Medicinal Chemistry”, “Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry” and “Current Pharmaceutical Design”. The articles are divided according to disease groups. The first section on Infectious Diseases contains two articles focusing on novel inhibitors of HIV integrase and mechanism of action of macrolide antibiotics. The section on Cardiovascular Diseases contains an article on antithrombotic agents. The four articles included in CNS Disorders section cover various facets of neurological drug development. The section on Endocrine Disorders includes five articles, each written by a leading expert in this field. Cancer treatment remains a very active area of research and there are five articles, each focusing on different therapeutic interventions against this important disease group. Four excellent articles are grouped together under the heading of Other Targets and New Approaches. One of these articles reviews VIP and drug design, while the two articles cover two different approaches of drug development based on recently discovered genomic targets and ethnobotanic knowledge to discover new molecular leads respectively. The last article in this section focuses on the treatment of autoimmune diseases by targeting natural killer T cells. The five articles in the last section cover Enabling Technologies as modern tools for drug development. There is no better time than now to be involved in medicinal or bioorganic chemistry research, because the tools available to the working scientists are so much improved and the spirit of multi-disciplinary collaboration is stronger than ever. The modern medicinal chemist wears many hats: that of synthetic chemist, computational analyst, biochemistry and pharmacology consultant, database manager and project champion. The process of drug discovery and development is filled with such a high level of risk that the occasional breakthrough, moment of insight or the advancement of a clinical candidate is all the more sweet and valued. Finally, as the authors reflected in this volume represent industrial and academic laboratories throughout the world, we remember that science and the joy of discovery is a great common bond that unites rather than divides. We thank all the contributors of this book series and hope that this volume will prove to be of interest to a large number of medicinal chemists.