Goal 3 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being at all ages. A major target proposed under this goal is to end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases, as well as combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases by 2030. Key to achieving this target is the rapid development of new, safer, and more efficacious treatments against infectious diseases. The year of 2020 has taught us that although well-known infections like AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis are still present and affecting millions of people worldwide, new and re-emerging infectious diseases can also pose a serious global threat to countries’ health systems and economies.
Drug discovery and development is a long and highly expensive process, usually taking 10-15 years from the early discovery of a molecular target or disease-relevant pathway to final approval of a candidate small molecule to be used in the clinic. Infectious diseases pose many additional challenges within this pathway in addition to the frequent emergence of drug resistance. The goal of this Research Topic is to gather contributions reporting the most up-to-date approaches aimed at the research and development of new drug treatments against established, new, and re-emerging infectious diseases. We would like to provide the reader a wide view of modern and inventive strategies to accelerate the discovery of new drugs to tackle the infectious diseases burden, moving towards fulfilling the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
We welcome articles (Original Research, Review, Mini Review, and Perspective) addressing any cutting-edge research using innovative strategies to accelerate the drug discovery process for infectious diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites. Specific themes include (but are not limited to):
• Molecular probes and tools
• Drug screening methods
• In vitro and animal disease models
• Target identification and validation
• Synthetic analogs inspired by natural products
• Small molecules developed by rational drug design approach
• Computer-aided and Artificial Intelligence-guided drug discovery
• Whole-genome analysis and computational modeling of infectious agents
• Gene editing and synthetic biology approaches for drug discovery
Although sole computational studies may be accepted, these must exhibit novel chemical insight and adopt the best rigorous practices for computational work. We strongly favor the experimental validation of results, especially for research on COVID-19.
Goal 3 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being at all ages. A major target proposed under this goal is to end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases, as well as combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases by 2030. Key to achieving this target is the rapid development of new, safer, and more efficacious treatments against infectious diseases. The year of 2020 has taught us that although well-known infections like AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis are still present and affecting millions of people worldwide, new and re-emerging infectious diseases can also pose a serious global threat to countries’ health systems and economies.
Drug discovery and development is a long and highly expensive process, usually taking 10-15 years from the early discovery of a molecular target or disease-relevant pathway to final approval of a candidate small molecule to be used in the clinic. Infectious diseases pose many additional challenges within this pathway in addition to the frequent emergence of drug resistance. The goal of this Research Topic is to gather contributions reporting the most up-to-date approaches aimed at the research and development of new drug treatments against established, new, and re-emerging infectious diseases. We would like to provide the reader a wide view of modern and inventive strategies to accelerate the discovery of new drugs to tackle the infectious diseases burden, moving towards fulfilling the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
We welcome articles (Original Research, Review, Mini Review, and Perspective) addressing any cutting-edge research using innovative strategies to accelerate the drug discovery process for infectious diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites. Specific themes include (but are not limited to):
• Molecular probes and tools
• Drug screening methods
• In vitro and animal disease models
• Target identification and validation
• Synthetic analogs inspired by natural products
• Small molecules developed by rational drug design approach
• Computer-aided and Artificial Intelligence-guided drug discovery
• Whole-genome analysis and computational modeling of infectious agents
• Gene editing and synthetic biology approaches for drug discovery
Although sole computational studies may be accepted, these must exhibit novel chemical insight and adopt the best rigorous practices for computational work. We strongly favor the experimental validation of results, especially for research on COVID-19.