Editorial: Drug Discovery Process for Kinease Inhibitors
Hilmar Weinmann, Rainer E. Metternich · ChemBioChem · 2005
This special issue of ChemBioChem contains peer-reviewed contributions devoted to "Kinases in Drug Discovery".With more than 518 kinases in the human kinome [1] and the overall costs of new drug development rapidly approaching the billion dollar mark, there is a great need for focused strategies and technologies to move kinase drug discovery forward in a more rapid and efficient manner.The major goal of this special issue is to outline trends in kinase-inhibitor research organized along the drug-discovery process. Target Identification and ValidationProtein kinases play a pivotal role in the regulation of a diverse range of cellular functions.It is therefore not surprising that abnormally elevated kinase activity can lead to various pathological conditions including proliferative diseases such as cancer, fibrosis, restenosis, psoriasis, and atherosclerosis as well as diabetes, inflammation, T-cell activation, tumor angiogenesis, osteoporosis, and platelet aggregation.The discovery and development of selective protein kinase inhibitors to treat diseases caused by the disregulation of signaling pathways has become an extremely promising and widespread approach for drug discovery. 03/2005ChemBioChem is a European journal of chemical biology; it is co-owned by a group of European scientific societies and published by WILEY-VCH.Contributions in ChemBioChem cover chemical biology and biological chemistry, medicinal chemistry, bioinorganic and bioorganic chemistry, biochemistry, molecular and structural biology, that is, research of the overlapping areas between biology and chemistry.