This volume offers a broad and interdisciplinary view of modern approaches to drug discovery as used by pharmaceutical companies and research institutes. It comprehensively covers proteomics, bioinformatics, screening techniques such as high-throughput-, natural compounds-, and NMR-based-screenings, combinatorial chemistry, compound library design, ligand- and structure-based drug design and pharmacokinetic approaches. Each of the thirteen chapters reviews the theory, background and application of a key technology in drug discovery, complemented by an extensive list of references to the...

Research in the pharmaceutical industry today is in many respects quite different from what it used to be only fifteen years ago. There have been dramatic changes in approaches for identifying new chemical entities with a desired biological activity. While chemical modification of existing leads was the most important approach in the 1970s and 1980s, high-throughput screening and structure-based design are now major players among a multitude of methods used in drug discov- ery. Quite often, companies favor one of these relatively new approaches over the other, e.g., screening over rational...

From our current knowledge, it is obvious that estrogen action in volves more than reproduction and fertility. Rather, estrogens affect and influence a number of other organ systems such as the immune, cardiovascular and central nervous system as well as the gastrointes tinal tract, urinary tract and skeleton. The importance of estrogens and estrogen receptor activity is appreciated from the spectrum of significant physiological dysfunctions that occur when there is a loss The participants of the workshop VI Preface of the hormone or the receptor activity. Loss of estrogen, however (for...