At the 14th International Medicinal Chemistry Symposium1 in 1996 I presented my perspective on the state of medicinal chemistry and its future development in the 21st century. As a dozen years have elapsed since that presentation, I thought it would be appropriate to comment briefly on factors that are playing roles in shaping scientific publishing and funding for research in medicinal chemistry since the start of the new millennium. While my perspective on academic medicinal chemistry is an update on trends in the U.S., the close association between U.S. and European medicinal chemistry make it likely that we share many of the same experiences.
An area of significant change is scientific publishing, given the bourgeoning increase in the number of scientific journals over the past decade. In view of >1.4 million scientific articles that are published annually in ~16,000 journals worldwide and the spiraling increases in the cost of subscriptions, libraries at academic institutions have restricted their periodical subscriptions to established journals with a sufficiently high impact factor for specific fields of research. In this regard, the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (JMC) maintains its premier status in the field with an impact factor of 5.1 and a record number of yearly citations (38,868 in 2006).
Starting in 2000, closer association was established between the JMC and the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC}. This was accomplished by the appointment of an officer of the EFMC as an ex officio member of the Editorial Advisory Board of JMC. These appointments, which have continued to the present day, have been instrumental in establishing closer ties between European and American medicinal chemists, as suggested by the joint symposia that have been organized by the EFMC and the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society.
Over the past dozen years the meteoric rise of the internet as a medium for communication has had a profound influence on publishing. All well-established medicinal chemistry journals are now published both electronically and as hard copy. The trend toward electronic scientific journals is clear. There has been a steady increase in web-based electronic subscriptions and a concomitant decline of print subscriptions. In the not-to-distant future, perhaps within ten years, web-based electronic publications may replace print entirely. In this regard, over the past decade a number of newly published medicinal chemistry journals have been published only in electronic format.
Making published biomedical research available to everyone through Open Access (OA) has been promoted on the premise that it will help advance science and improve human health. This was the basis for the April 7, 2008, implementation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy that requires every NIH grantee to submit to PubMed Central, an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscript that has been accepted for publication no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. In view of the possible citation advantage in making the results of scientific studies widely available, it may be advantageous for authors to submit their papers to PubMed Central even when their research was not funded by NIH. This OA policy is expected to have a broad impact on communication between different scientific disciplines, including medicinal chemistry.
Due to the flat NIH budget, academic medicinal chemists must submit a greater number of grant applications to obtain research funding. Although NIH funding doubled between 1997 and 2003, the levels since then have increased only marginally. In fact, the success rate for grant applications on first submission has dropped from 29% in 1999 to 12% last year. Due to the ripple affect of this “broken pipeline” for research funding, the profile of medicinal chemistry as a discipline at large U.S. universities has risen over the past decade because it is now recognized by university administrators that technology transfer developed by medicinal chemists is a means of supplementing overhead income to support the infrastructure for biomedical research. During the last millennium overhead income generated from NIH grants was adequate, but with the decline in funding other sources of income are being sought to support the infrastructure for research. Consequently, medicinal chemists in particular are the beneficiaries of such increased visibility. For example, in order to foster technology transfer at my university, special innovation grants are provided to investigators whose technology is sufficiently promising for commercialization.
These are exciting times for conducting research in medicinal chemistry because a multiplicity of technological advances have provided medicinal chemists many more options to facilitate their research than in the last millennium. With all these tools presently available to medicinal chemists, it would not be farfetched to describe the first decade of the 21st century as the “golden age” of medicinal chemistry with respect to development of new concepts for future drug design. Because of these advances, the lure of medicinal chemistry as a discipline has attracted an increasing number of chemists to the field. The significant overlap between chemical biology, bioorganic chemistry, biochemistry, and medicinal chemistry is symptomatic of the multifaceted nature of our discipline due in part to the diverse expertise of chemists who have developed an interest in relating molecular structure to biology over the past decade.
By Philip S. Portoghese
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(1) P.S. Portoghese in Proceedings of the XIVth International Symposium on Medicinal
Chemistry, F. Awouters, Ed., Elsevier Science B.V., 409-419, 1997
