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Your drug candidate isn t safe or patentable? The solution may be just a short hop away! Professional drug developers use real-world examples to demonstrate how every medicinal chemist can be more creative and more successful through scaffold-based design of molecules.

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This first systematic treatment of the concept and practice of scaffold hopping shows the tricks of the trade and provides invaluable guidance for the reader´s own projects.

The first section serves as an introduction to the topic by describing the concept of scaffolds, their discovery, diversity and representation, and their importance for finding new chemical entities. The following part describes the most common tools and methods for scaffold hopping, whether topological, shape-based or structure-based. Methods such as CATS, Feature Trees, Feature Point Pharmacophores (FEPOPS), and SkelGen are discussed among many others. The final part contains three fully documented real-world examples of successful drug development projects by scaffold hopping that illustrate the benefits of the approach for medicinal chemistry.

While most of the case studies are taken from medicinal chemistry, chemical and structural biologists will also benefit greatly from the insights presented here.

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PART I: SCAFFOLDS: IDENTIFICATION, REPRESENTATION DIVERSITY AND NAVIGATION
Identifying and Representing Scaffolds
Markush Structures and Chemical Patents
Scaffold Diversity in Medicinal Chemistry Space
Scaffold Mining of Publicly Available Compound Data
Exploring Virtual Scaffold Spaces
PART II: SCAFFOLD HOPPING METHODS
Similarity-Based Scaffold Hopping Using 2D Fingerprints
CATS for Scaffold-Hopping in Medicinal Chemistry
Reduced Graphs
Feature Trees
Feature Point Pharmacophores (FEPOPS)
Three-Dimensional Scaffold Replacement Methods
Spherical Harmonic Molecular Surfaces (ParaSurf and ParaFit)
The XED Forcefield and Spark
Molecular Interaction Fingerprints
SkelGen
PART III: CASE STUDIES
Case Study 1: Scaffold Hopping for T-Type Calcium Channel and Glycine Transporter Type 1 Inhibitors
Case Study 2: Bioisosteric Replacements for the Neurokinin 1 Receptor (NK1R)
Case Study 3: Fragment Hopping to Design Highly Potent and Selective Neuronal Nitric Oxide Synthase Inhibitors

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"This book outlines the key concepts, methods and examples of scaffold hopping in pharmaceutical and related industries. Examples from academia and from industry are fully described, and this book serves as the primary reference to the current state of research in the field." ( ChemMedChem , 1 January 2015)

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