Dear Colleagues,

Heteroatoms constitute a very common fragment of a number of active pharmaceutical ingredients, as well as excipients; from the point of view of significance, it is all the same if these are isosterically/bioisosterically replaced carbons/carbon substructures in aliphatic structures or real heterocycles. Many heterocyclic scaffolds can be considered as privilege structures. Most frequently, nitrogen heterocycles or various positional combinations of nitrogen atoms, sulphur and oxygen in five- or six-membered rings can be found. According to statistics, more than 85% of all biologically-active chemical entities contain a heterocycle. This fact reflects the central role of heterocycles in modern drug design. The application of heterocycles provides a useful tool for modification of solubility, lipophilicity, polarity and hydrogen bonding capacity of biologically active agents, which results in the optimization of the ADME/Tox properties of drugs or drug candidates. The increasing presence of various heterocycles in drugs is related to advances in synthetic methodologies, such as metal-catalysed cross-coupling and hetero-coupling reactions, that allow rapid access to a wide variety of functionalized heterocycles. On the other hand, many heterocyclic lead compounds were isolated from natural resources, and their structures were subsequently simplified and modified by medicinal chemists. Thus, heterocycles have critical importance for medicinal chemists, because using them, it is possible to expand the available drug-like chemical space and drive more effective drug discovery programs. As medicinal chemistry is “a chemistry-based discipline, also involving aspects of biological, medical and pharmaceutical sciences” and “concerned with the invention, discovery, design, identification and preparation of biologically active compounds, the study of their metabolism, the interpretation of their mode of action at the molecular level and the construction of structure-activity relationships”, this Special Issue of Molecules titled “Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry” is devoted to the following research topics focused on heterocycles: (i) synthesis and analysis; (ii) natural compounds; (iii) carbohydrates; (iv) drug design; (v) in silico investigations; (vi) biological screening; (vii) chemical biology and biological chemistry; (vii) biomaterials; and in general, other topics related to heterocycles.

Prof. Dr. Josef Jampilek
Guest Editor

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• drugs
• heterocycles
• pharmacophore
• drug design
• computer study
• synthesis
• analysis
• natural compounds
• carbohydrates
• physicochemical properties
• ADMET
• biological screening
• chemical biology
• biological chemistry
• biomaterials

• Heterocycles in Medicinal Chemistry II in Molecules (7 articles)