Chemistry-Based Strategies for Drug Delivery and Targeting
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Medicinal Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2018)
Special Issue Editor
Interests: drug delivery; nanomedicine; nanocarriers; biopolymers; pharmaceutical technology; ocular drug delivery; oral drug delivery
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The optimization of a drug molecule from a chemical point of view, e.g., under a structure-activity profile, is often not satisfactory to ensure that the active compound will reach the target tissue/organ at effective levels, or that it attains the necessary concentration in the body. A scarce pharmacokinetic profile is often the cause for putting aside compounds that have shown valid pharmacological outlines and a promising therapeutic future.
Increasing the dosage of drugs cannot be always the right solution, since it can cause severe side effects and can damage healthy cells and organs.
Therefore, in the last few decades, different approaches aiming at modulating the release of drugs and/or targeting them to selective tissues have become an essential partner of the industrial drug development stage. Chemistry-based delivery strategies are potentially able to improve the therapeutic index and safety of active compounds, as well as to give a second chance to ‘old’ drugs that have lost their clinical interest because of unsatisfactory physico-chemical, pharmacokinetic, or toxicological properties.
All these approaches would require a detailed and update knowledge of the biochemical pathways in health and pathological situations and of the enzymatic scenery in different tissues and organs, that can affect the activation of these chemical systems and localized release of the bioactive cargo.
Accepted contributions can be mainly (but not exclusively) focused on recent innovations in the following topics:
- Prodrug and soft-drug synthesis, characterization, formulation and biological evaluation
- Chemical delivery systems (CDS), i.e., chemical entities that recognize specific enzymes exclusively at the site of action/metabolism
- Retrometabolic drug design studies
- Synthetic strategies to achieve targeting features on a drug molecule
- Bioconjugate chemistry
- Polymer-drug conjugates (polymeric prodrugs)
- Drug conjugation to nanoparticulate carriers
- Biochemical studies unveiling novel potential biological targets for the chemical delivery systems
- Hydrophobic ion-pairing.
This Special Issue will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to academy and pharma industry researchers, which are involved in both medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical technology fields.
Prof. Rosario Pignatello
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Molecules is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
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Keywords
- Prodrugs
- Ion pairs
- Conjugates
- Controlled drug delivery
- Drug targeting
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