Drug Design

This book represents a case study based overview of many different aspects of drug development, ranging from target identification and characterization to chemical optimization for efficacy and safety, as well as bioproduction of natural products utilizing for example lichen. Since drug development is a highly complex multidisciplinary process, case studies are an excellent tool to obtain insight in this field.

This volume is a potpourri of review articles and research articles related to the "Bioactive Drugs in Drug Discovery and Design". It can be regarded as a continuation volume of the Vol. 22 published by IOS Press in the series of Biomedical and Health Research. Most of the articles are part of the lectures given in the course of "Medicinal Chemistry" for graduate students. The book as the first volume is divided into four different topics in order to help the reader locate easily the manuscript of his interest. The topics which are covered in this book are the synthesis and properties of bioactive molecules and enzymes, the role of membranes in drug activity and formulation, the conformational analysis of bioactive drugs and the molecular targets and drug design.