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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.

Written with the practicing medicinal chemist in mind, this is the first modern handbook to systematically address the topic of bioisosterism. As such, it provides a ready reference on the principles and methods of bioisosteric replacement as a key tool in preclinical drug development. The first part provides an overview of bioisosterism, classical bioisosteres and typical molecular interactions that need to be considered, while the second part describes a number of molecular databases as sources of bioisosteric identification and rationalization. The third part covers the four key methodologies for bioisostere identification and replacement: physicochemical properties, topology, shape, and overlays of protein-ligand crystal structures. In the final part, several real-world examples of bioisosterism in drug discovery projects are discussed. With its detailed descriptions of databases, methods and real-life case studies, this is tailor-made for busy industrial researchers with little time for reading, while remaining easily accessible to novice drug developers due to its systematic structure and introductory section.