When intellectual property attorneys describe innovations in their patents and patent applications, they always craft their narratives around two fundamental characteristics: conception and reduction to practice. The former describes an idea or concept, and the latter involves translating that idea or concept into something tangible and useful. When ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters (ACS MCL) was first conceived of in 2009 and launched in 2010, we set out a bold vision for the journal that was captured in an editorial I wrote in March 2010. As I stated then, “As its founding Editor-in-Chief, I am fully committed to making it the premier international journal for rapid communication of cutting-edge studies that span all areas of medicinal chemistry.”
I can legitimately classify this vision as “bold” for several reasons. First, we, of course, had several well-established competitors who would likely do their best to outperform ACS MCL. Second, our sister journal, the venerable Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (JMC), had been (and continues to be) the gold standard for publishing full-length medicinal chemistry studies. It wasn’t obvious at the time that ACS MCL would necessarily inherit those high-quality, rapid communication manuscripts that would no longer be published in JMC. So, we asked ourselves what features could be incorporated into ACS MCL that would differentiate it from these other choices?
In addition to publishing concise reports on high-quality medicinal chemistry studies, ACS MCL became the first “medchem” journal to publish Patent Highlights—short summaries of recently issued patents or patent applications in high-interest areas with brief commentaries on their potential impact to the medicinal chemistry field. These proved to be quite useful since, at the time of their printing, they often contained the only public domain descriptions of new drug candidates. Also, in collaboration with Chemical Abstracts Services (CAS), ACS MCL became the first journal to include hot links to patents and patent applications cited in articles. This feature soon became so popular that it was adopted by all ACS journals.
ACS MCL initiated the inclusion of Viewpoints—expert commentaries from invited guests that explain, analyze, and contextualize emerging topics in the medicinal chemistry field or that discuss general issues involving pharmaceutical development. We also publish Technology Notes—short articles that describe advances in the myriad of technologies (high-throughput/high-content screening, robotics, structure-based drug design, fragment-based drug design, combinatorial chemistry/parallel synthesis, etc.) that facilitate and partially define modern medicinal chemistry. ACS MCL also publishes Notes, which are well suited for reporting limited but nonetheless interesting findings on projects that are near completion.
Given the vast number of scientific articles published each week that impinge on medicinal chemistry, the mere act of staying current on publications directly related to our own areas of interest is quite challenging. One consequence of this is that many of us may miss innovations that have broad applicability, simply because they were described in articles not on our normal routine reading lists. For example, over the past decade we have seen new techniques and methodologies that have simultaneously reduced the scale and increased the throughput of screening and optimization processes in both chemistry and biology. While these approaches were initiated to facilitate specific projects, their potential impact goes well beyond those original projects. Wouldn’t it be nice if articles that focused on actual innovations were available as a complement to the project-related articles already being published!
To address this, several years ago ACS MCL initiated a new manuscript type, called Innovations. These personalized reviews are intended to highlight innovations that were integral to a discovery or development campaign but have broader implications. While their primary focus is on science, these articles may also include, when appropriate, parts of the innovation’s backstory (i.e., relevant intellectual property issues, strategic business decisions, regulatory issues, etc.) that had an effect on the path that was ultimately pursued.
To complement the more detailed stories described in Innovations, we have also initiated Topical Innovations. This manuscript type is designed to provide an opportunity to report concise and timely reviews of topics that are of great interest to the medicinal chemistry community. One of the first of these, by Altman et al., is included in this issue (DOI: 10.1021/acsmedchemlett.1c00623). It highlights five therapeutics that were first reported or first comprehensively characterized within ACS MCL: Ivosidenib, Siponimod, Glasdegib, Parsaclisib, and Dabrafenib. This Topical Innovation was written by the ACS MCL Early Career Board, a group of rising stars from both the academic and pharmaceutical sectors.
The first editorial I wrote for ACS MCL in 2010 began with the English translation of an ancient Chinese proverb (and curse) that I thought was well suited to describe the then-current state of medicinal chemistry: “May you live in interesting times.” Well, I certainly got my wish! New therapies are being approved at an unprecedented rate, and this achievement is due in large part to medicinal chemistry discoveries. Moreover, two years into the worst pandemic the world has seen in a century, medicinal chemists at Pfizer and at the Emory Institute for Drug Development were able to discover and develop two orally available antiviral therapies (Paxlovid and molnupiravir, respectively) that provide an important complement to the excellent mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. These cases are examples of the great number of important discoveries that are made regularly and unequivocally establish the centrality of medicinal chemistry in the quest to address unmet medical needs.
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.