The post highlighting the RSC MedChem School reminded me that I occasionally get asked to suggest books on Drug Discovery. I've compiled a list of books here, if anyone has suggestions for additions please let me know.

I see that John Emsley, author of the new book Molecules of Murder: Potential Poisons is at a book signing tonight https://twitter.com/RoySocChem/status/901054073440526340

If you can't make it, the books are available elsewhere. The ideal coffee table book.

The Handbook of Medicinal Chemistry is a new book providing insight and advice for medicinal chemists.

Drug discovery is a constantly developing and expanding area of research. Developed to provide a comprehensive guide, the Handbook of Medicinal Chemistry covers the past, present and future of the entire drug development process. Highlighting the recent successes and failures in drug discovery, the book helps readers to understand the factors governing modern drug discovery from the initial concept through to a marketed medicine. With chapters covering a wide range of topics from drug discovery processes and optimization, development of synthetic routes, pharmaceutical properties and computational biology, the handbook aims to enable medicinal chemists to apply their academic understanding to every aspect of drug discovery. Each chapter includes expert advice to not only provide a rigorous understanding of the principles being discussed, but to provide useful hints and tips gained from within the pharmaceutical industry. This expertise, combined with project case studies, highlighting and discussing all areas of successful projects, make this an essential handbook for all those involved in pharmaceutical development.

A free app has also been created in collaboration with the editors of the book. The Medicinal Chemistry Toolkit provides a suite of resources to support the day to day work of a medicinal chemist

The a third edition of the popular book, The Organic Chemistry of Drug Design and Drug Action by Silverman and Holladay has just been released, I’ve added it to the book list.

Vortex users might be interested in a new script that implements an interesting paper from Wagner et al Moving beyond Rules: The Development of a Central Nervous System Multiparameter Optimization (CNS MPO) Approach To Enable Alignment of Druglike Properties DOI that describes an algorithm to score compounds with respect to CNS penetration.

Lilly MedChem rules can now be installed using Homebrew. In late 2012 Robert Bruns and Ian Watson published a paper entitled Rules for Identifying Potentially Reactive or Promiscuous Compounds DOI. This article describes a set of 275 rules, developed over an 18-year period, used to identify compounds that may interfere with biological assays, allowing their removal from screening sets.

Those who heard Derek Lowe’s presentation at the Cambridge MedChem Meeting might be interested in reading the book by Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation excerpts of which he used to illustrate his talk.

Updated Essential Reading