New Concepts in the Drug Discovery Process

The scientific and commercial value of synthetic organic chemistry research seems to have been underestimated in the recent decades dominated by molecular biology, genomics, products from exotic natural sources, and so on. However, it was recently stated that synthetic methods still attract most of the attention of the reader-ship of many leading American Chemical Society (ACS) chemical journals [7]. Thus, five of the top ten most requested articles in the CAS Science Spotlight are from J Am Chem Soc and all refer to synthetic methods. The first four papers refer to reactions that are suitable for work on a large scale. The author concluded that nowadays, the fine chemicals industry and pharmaceutical industry generally rely on university research to discover new reactions, which are then adapted to industrial processes. The chapters in this book report many such examples. 

1 The Impact of Natural Products on Modern Drug Discovery 

Although many traditional drugs were originally obtained from plants, there have been times when large pharmaceutical companies were reluctant to initiate projects based on chemical modification of natural products, because of the additional challenges of isolation and amenity to synthetic modification. Now, with the options for available active structural scaffolds becoming more complex, we have entered a period of renewed enthusiasm. Some aspects of this approach to modem drug discovery will be analyzed briefly here. 

There are two important arguments in favour of synthetic modification of natural products  

Whichever route raie takes, the opportunities for innovation are immense. In terms of biological space, structural restrictions are provided by possible active target sites. The human genome craisists of 3 x 10 genes, of which rafly a small fraction is targeted by current therapeutics [12, 13]. Conformational changes, mutations and 

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