Book description
Written with the practicing medicinal chemist in mind, this is the
first modern handbook to systematically address the topic of bioisosterism.
As such, it provides a ready reference on the principles and methods of
bioisosteric replacement as a key tool in preclinical drug development.
The first part provides an overview of bioisosterism, classical
bioisosteres and typical molecular interactions that need to be considered,
while the second part describes a number of molecular databases as
sources of bioisosteric identification and rationalization. The third part
covers the four key methodologies for bioisostere identification and
replacement: physicochemical properties, topology, shape, and overlays of
protein-ligand crystal structures. In the final part, several real-world
examples of bioisosterism in drug discovery projects are discussed.
With its detailed descriptions of databases, methods and real-life case
studies, this is tailor-made for busy industrial researchers with little
time for reading, while remaining easily accessible to novice drug
developers due to its systematic structure and introductory section.
Nathan Brown
is the Head of the In Silico Medicinal Chemistry group in the Cancer
Therapeutics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research in London (UK). At
the ICR, Nathan and his group support our entire drug discovery
portfolio together with developing new computational methodologies to
enhance our drug design work.
Nathan conducted his doctoral research in Sheffield with Professor
Peter Willett focusing on evolutionary algorithms and graph theory.
After a two-year Marie Curie fellowship in Amsterdam in collaboration
with Professor Johann Gasteiger in Erlangen, he joined the Novartis
Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel for a three-year
Presidential fellowship in Basel working with Professors Peter Willett
and Karl-Heinz Altmann.
Nathan?s work has led to the pioneering work on mulitobjective de novo
design in addition to a variety of discoveries and method development in
bioisosteric identification and replacement, scaffold hopping, molecular
descriptors and statistical modelling. Nathan continues to pursue his
research in all aspects of in silico medicinal chemistry.
