Preface

Over the past ten years, significant advances have been made in the treatment of cancers. Nevertheless, despite the progress of chemotherapy, cancer remains a devastating disease: one in three people in the western world develop cancer and one in five die from it. It is therefore a priority to continue our search for more effective drugs in order to obtain a favorable outcome in the battle against cancer. The search for new anticancer drugs is a very active field, nourished by our improved advances in the understanding of the cell biology of cancer and the emergence of modern technologies. New tactical approaches are continuously developed to identify novel targets selective for cancer cells, to design drugs with better therapeutic ratios, and to establish efficient screening procedures. Promising new therapeutic targets, such as telomerase and certain tyrosine kinases for example, have emerged in the past ten years as a result of the recent advances in understanding of the biology of malignant cells. These efforts are now beginning to pay dividends. The complete sequencing of the human genome will no doubt also contribute to the identification of new targets and therefore to the design of drugs with novel mechanism of action. However, our capacity to design tumor-specific drugs will not only depend on our ability to identify key targets but, above all, on our capacity to synthesize new compounds and to select the best candidates through appropriate screening models. Rational drug design is a difficult exercise and at the same time an interesting challenge. It is our hope that this new journal, Current Medicinal Chemistry - Anti-Cancer Agents, will help chemists and biologists to follow what is going on in the field and to continually update their knowledge.

 

 

Pr. Michelle Prudhomme

Editor-in-Chief

Current Medicinal Chemistry - Anti Cancer Agents