Medicinal Chemistry Approaches To Creating Targeted Medicines

Personalized medicines are therapies that maximize the biological effectiveness of treatment by targeting the molecular drivers of the disease through a deep understanding of disease biology, identifying and treating the patients most likely to respond based on personal genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and perhaps epigenomics. This ability to very selectively target appropriate patient populations has become the foundation of much of drug discovery in the past decade due to the remarkable advances in molecular biology and diagnostics that have enabled the understanding of many diseases at the genomic level. Personalized medicine has become even more important, as healthcare costs continue to soar, such that creating the ideal situation where patients would only receive a potent, safe, and efficacious drug that treats their specific disease at a dose that is titrated for their metabolism has become an ethical, a societal, and an economic imperative. The state of personalized medicine today finds different therapeutic areas at very different stages of development. For oncology most of the personalized medicine approaches reflect attempts to design drugs that very selectively target the drivers of a patient’s specific cancer. In diseases of neuroscience, current personalized approaches attempt to treat these complex diseases through polypharmacy. For inflammatory diseases, personalized medicine requires strategies for subsetting patients to ensure that the medicine is treating the underlying causes of the disease. In all of these therapeutic areas, the role of medicinal chemistry is to create drugs with very specific properties and biological activities to achieve the objectives of personalization of medical care. The techniques and strategies needed by medicinal chemists ranging from identifying active compounds to optimizing chemical series for the intended patient population, delivery route, and combination therapy required to enable personalized medicine will be discussed in this book. This book will cover the meaning of personalized medicine, its importance, how it is implemented, and how medicinal chemistry has evolved to facilitate it. Since drug discovery research to achieve personalized health care is being 1