Design, synthesis and function of pharmaceuticals

The demand for novel pharmaceuticals (therapeutic peptides or DNA/RNA, drugs, vaccines) increases rapidly with a quickly growing world population. The pace at which these pharmaceuticals become available has slowed down as the pharmaceutical industry is extremely hesitant to develop new drugs without a deep understanding of the complex interactions between the molecules and the host.

Additional levels of complexity include the required very high selectivity of the designed molecules and their often very complex structures. Dealing with the complexity at both the molecular and the cellular levels has become essential and is also timely; the rapid progress in structural biology and organic synthesis, together with the results from the “omics” (bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics) and “systems” (supramolecular and systems chemistry, systems and synthetic biology) approaches now allows designing and synthesizing novel bioactives; e.g. potential drugs and vaccines with unprecedented structural complexity.

Within the theme Molecular Life and Health all aspects of design, synthesis and function of novel drugs and vaccines are addressed, for instance for Parkinson and some neglected diseases (e.g. tuberculosis, malaria, and schistosomiasis).