After over half a century of chemotherapy research, cancer remains one of the most difficult life-threatening diseases to treat, a consequence of factors which include limitations of animal models, tumour diversity, drug resistance and side effects of therapy. This introductory overview gives a brief perspective on the discovery of historical cytotoxic and anti-hormonal drugs, and then highligh…
Many authors use the term “pharmacophores” to define functional or structural elements possessing biological activity. This does not correspond to the official definition elaborated by an IUPAC working party and published in 1998 [1]: A pharmacophore is the ensemble of steric and electronic features that is necessary to ensure the optimal supramolecular interactions with a specific biologic…