Medicinal Chemistry Research - Call for papers for a special issue in honor of Prof. Stephen Neidle

The special issue will be guest edited by Drs. Shozeb Haider, Claudia Sissi, and John S. Schneekloth, Jr. We would like to invite you to submit a comment, review, brief report, or research article to this special issue under the broad theme of drug discovery.

We aim for submission by March 31, 2024, and publication of the special issue in summer 2024. 

Please specify S.I.: Honoring Prof. Neidle under the Additional Information/Questionnaire tab during submission.

We are seeking your support for a special issue in honor of Prof. Stephen Neidle, a highly regarded X-ray crystallographer, medicinal chemist and drug discoverer, who has made numerous contributions to our understanding of small molecule-nucleic acid recognition, and has notably exploited this information in the discovery and development of novel anti-cancer agents. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1970 from Imperial College, London, under the supervision of Dr. Donald Rogers and focused on the X-ray crystallography of streptomycin. His postdoctoral research, as an ICI Fellow of the University of London, was in association with Dr. Michael B. Hursthouse. He then joined in 1972 the Biophysics Department at King's College London, where he began his structural studies on nucleic acids and nucleic acid-drug complexes. He moved in 1986 to the Institute of Cancer Research, Sutton as a CRC Life Fellow to head the Biomolecular Structure Unit, working on anticancer drug development and drug complexes with nucleic acid and protein targets of clinical importance. In 1990, Professor Neidle was appointed to the Chair of Biophysics at the Institute of Cancer Research and then made Academic Dean from 1997 to 2002. In 2002, he moved to the School of Pharmacy, University of London, as the first holder of the Chair of Chemical Biology. He also served as Research Director of the School before his formal retirement in 2016.

Professor Neidle has published over 500 papers, written/edited 9 books and principal inventor on 13 patent filings (10 granted to date). His current h index: 114 (Google Scholar). He was one of the first recipients of the Cancer Research Campaign Career Development Award and was a Life Fellow and Professorial Fellow of Cancer Research UK from 1986 to 2012. He has been recognized with a number of awards, including the Sosnovsky and Aventis Prizes for his work on the medicinal chemistry of cancer, the Interdisciplinary and Medicinal Chemistry Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Paul Ehrlich, Kelland, and Guggenheim Lectureships, and a visiting professorship at the University of Rome.

Professor Neidle served as the European Editor and then the Editor-in-Chief of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters 2019-2021 and as a member of the editorial boards of the journals Nucleic Acids Research and Methods. He chaired the editorial board of Annual Reports in Medicinal Chemistry from 2016 to 2022 and was Chairman of the Editorial Boards of Tetrahedron Journals from 2011 to 2013 and the RSC Biomolecular Sciences book series. 

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Sincerely,
 
Shozeb Haider (shozeb.haider@ucl.ac.uk)
Claudia Sissi (claudia.sissi@unipd.it)
John S. Schneekloth, Jr. (jay.schneekloth@nih.gov)
(Guest Editors)