Drug Design, Development and Therapy

Aims and Scope

Drug Design, Development and Therapy is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that spans the spectrum of drug design, discovery and development through to clinical applications.

The journal is characterized by the rapid reporting of high-quality original research, reviews, expert opinions, commentary and clinical studies in all therapeutic areas.

Drug Design, Development and Therapy will no longer consider meta-analyses for publication. 

All authors who want to submit their work to Drug Design, Development and Therapy are encouraged to read and adhere to the guidelines provided in the Editorial titled ‘Statistical Analysis in Clinical and Experimental Medical Research: Simplified Guidance for Authors and Reviewers’. The Editorial can be found here.

Specific topics covered by the journal include: 

• Drug target identification and validation
• Phenotypic screening and target deconvolution 
• Biochemical analyses of drug targets and their pathways
• New methods or relevant applications in molecular/drug design and computer-aided drug discovery*
• Design, synthesis, and biological evaluation of novel biologically active compounds (including diagnostics or chemical probes)
• Structural or molecular biological studies elucidating molecular recognition processes
• Fragment-based drug discovery
• Pharmaceutical/red biotechnology
• Isolation, structural characterization, (bio)synthesis, bioengineering and pharmacological evaluation of natural products**
• Distribution, pharmacokinetics and metabolic transformations of drugs or biologically active compounds in drug development
• Drug delivery and formulation (design and characterization of dosage forms, release mechanisms and in vivo testing)
• Preclinical development studies
• Translational animal models
• Mechanisms of action and signalling pathways
• Toxicology
• Gene therapy, cell therapy and immunotherapy
• Personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics
• Clinical drug evaluation
• Patient safety and sustained use of medicines

The journal does not accept study protocols or case reports. 

Case reports/series submitted to Drug Design, Development and Therapy will be diverted to the International Medical Case Reports Journal (The International Medical Case Reports Journal is not an Impact Factor journal).

* Computational modelling, in silico screening and molecular docking studies must be validated using appropriate in vitro or in vivo methods.

** Plant extract studies will only be considered if the active compound has been identified and validated. 

When considering submission of a paper utilizing publicly available data authors should ensure that such studies add significantly to the body of knowledge and that they are validated using the authors’ own data through replication in an original sample.