Introductory Editorial for ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters.

“May you live in interesting times.” This English translation of an ancient Chinese proverb (and curse) seems well-suited to describe the current state of medicinal chemistry. In the pharmaceutical industry, the mergers and acquisitions of the past decade have forced an increasing number of medicinal chemists to find nontraditional ways to ply their trade. Over the same time period, academia has seen a steady growth in the number of scientists who use “medicinal chemistry” as one of their descriptors. Indeed, medicinal chemistry has broadened in terms of interfacial fields of study, such as chemical biology, chemical physiology, proteomics, and metabolomics, which add richness to its intellectual content. Layer on top of this the huge technical advances that have occurred in this field, as well as in the many biological and computational fields that directly impinge on it, and you'll understand why “interesting times” concisely conveys the dynamism of this rapidly evolving area of study. So how can practicing medicinal chemists keep up with all of the innovations and changes that are happening in the field? I suggest that that one of the best ways is for you to become a regular reader of ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, a new journal that is as fast-paced as the field that it serves. As its founding Editor-in-Chief, I am fully committed to making it the premier international journal for rapid communication of cutting-edge studies that span all areas of medicinal chemistry. ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters will keep you at the forefront of the field with quick, brief reports of experimental and theoretical results in all aspects of medicinal chemistry (pure and applied) and its extension into pharmacology. The journal publishes high-quality studies on subjects ranging from compound discovery, design, and optimization; biological evaluation and new screening methodology; drug metabolism and delivery; new targets and their ligands; and molecular pharmacology. In addition, ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters welcomes articles that describe innovations to the “Drug Discovery Toolbox”, the basket term that we use to describe a myriad of technologies, such as high-throughput/high-content screening, robotics, structure-based drug design, fragment-based drug design, combinatorial chemistry/parallel synthesis, etc., which simultaneously facilitate and partially define modern medicinal chemistry. In the coming months ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters will also initiate a section dealing with “hot” patents, that is, recently issued medicinal chemistry patents, which may be at the time of issue the only public domain source of scientific details in the selected areas. The coverage would feature patents and published patent applications in high-interest areas with brief commentaries on their potential impact. Medicinal chemistry research can (and often does) change the world for the benefit of mankind. However, to the public and even to many of our biomedical colleagues, our field is increasingly being viewed as a support service for the biological sciences, rather than as one of the fundamental components of drug discovery and development. I believe that it is time to re-educate these groups about the importance of medicinal chemistry and about the constant stream of innovations that is being developed in this area. As a consequence, ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters will from time to time include editorials from the Editor(s) or OpEd (Viewpoint) articles from invited guests that discuss specific issues and innovations in medicinal chemistry or general issues involving pharmaceutical development. We will welcome opposing viewpoints or responses to OpEd pieces to facilitate a dialogue with the community. We have put together a great editorial team that includes Dr. Bruce Maryanoff, now at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, and Dr. Peter Wipf at the University of Pittsburgh, and me. Together, we have crafted a set of criteria for compound characterization and Supporting Information that is rigorous but at the same time neither time-consuming nor onerous. We are trying to be sensitive to the needs of the scientific community by limiting unnecessary administrative burdens to the publication of quality work. As a plus for prospective authors, our online format permits Letters to be up to 5 pages in size. We expect to publish articles within 4−6 weeks of submission, and our award-winning ACS Publications Web Editions Platform will showcase your important findings to the international scientific community. I invite you to submit your late-breaking research to ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters. Backed by the full support of the American Chemical Society, we will deliver the most urgent research results to the world in record time.