Editorial

Dear Colleague,

the European Medicinal Chemistry Community is still facing the problem that in some countries Medicinal Chemistry is not considered to be an independent scientific field. The perspective article in this issue, written by Henk Timmerman, gives a pronounced view on this situation and I highly encourage you to send your comments to this article to gerhard.f.ecker@univie.ac.at. The EFMC is putting a lot of efforts into promoting Medicinal Chemistry as a scientific discipline by organising and co-organising major scientific events in the field. Our main scientific event is the International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC-ISMC), which will take place this year in Vienna, August 31 – September 4. Registration is already open and the deadline for submitting abstracts is April 10. Last year EFMC and the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society launched a new meeting series, Frontiers in Medicinal Chemistry, which had its first, very successful event in Siena in October 2007. The next meeting will be organised together with our colleagues from Spain in October 2009. Last but not least EFMC and ChemBridge Corporation each odd year jointly organise the ASMC meeting - Advances in Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry, which took place last August in St. Petersburg and attracted more than 600 scientists. Besides these major activities EFMC sponsors more than 10 events and schools each year. In an effort to increase the information content of our web-page we will soon offer the possibility to download the abstract books of our sponsored events, if the organisers agree.

MedChemWatch is now starting into the second year and we would like to encourage you to participate more actively by sending your comments, proposing topics and providing us with information important to the filed, so that we can fulfil our aim of promoting exchange of ideas, thoughts, and visions for the future of Medicinal Chemistry. To ensure that we are using the correct e-mail address, or if you would like to receiving the newsletter directly in your mailbox, please register on our web-page www.efmc.info.

Gerhard Ecker
Editor