Welcome back to Bucket List Papers
Sometime ago we started regularly posting what we think are the 100 must read papers computational and medicinal chemistry papers. This was the “Bucket list”, which was updated at a rate of two papers a week until we got too busy last year. So apologies for the gap of eighteen months; it was pandemic related, but in a good way. Essentially, we started contributing to #covid_moonshot, the global effort to find novel small molecule inhibitors of the SARS-COV2 virus protease. This took up all of our spare capacity and more. So here we go again the list is finalised and there are 46 to go.
What makes a good Medicinal Chemistry Paper?
In the next few weeks, we will start posting recommended papers for the medicinal chemist and in particular ‘case studies’. A large proportion of medchem papers are description of the research efforts towards finding new drugs and, as many of you know, a subset of these are the scientific discoveries of the actual drug then gets market approval. We want to pick some ‘old-classic’ from the back catalogue and some newer discoveries that better represented the modern paradigm. It is possible to produce a bucket list of 100 such papers, but this reduces the value of each recommendation. We could select the papers as the drug molecule in question represented a first-in-class discovery, but this might be of little value if this the area is fully exemplified. Alternatively, we could recommend papers that are very well described science, quality diagrams and rich in data, but the actual science might not be that interesting. So what we think is useful, and on-going, are drug discovery examples where the scientific method to tackling and solving the issues encountered during the research are excellent. These papers serve as being educational, referential and significant as they led to a drug molecule treating disease. So, we hope you like the examples we have chosen, with a selection published during last ten years of global drug discovery, as these cover the modern paradigm of complex multiple parameter optimisation and techniques.