Editorial

Dear Colleague,

safety sciences and predictive toxicology are becoming increasingly an important issue in drug discovery and development. Thus, a more rational approach to safety assessments in early drug discovery is presently the focus of large centrally funded predictive toxicology initiatives both in Europe and the US.

Read in this issue of MedChemWatch a condensed version of the full article published in Medicinal Chemistry in Europe, the Yearbook of EFMC.
The lab-presentation features the lab of Povl Krogsgaard-Larsen at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Copenhagen. Prof. Krogsgaard-Larsen is also one of the two European Editors of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
Each second year EFMC presents three major awards, the Nauta Award for Pharmacochemistry, the UCB – Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry and the Prous Institute – Overton and Meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery. More information and the application deadline can be found in this issue.
Last but not least we had several very successful events, the International Symposium on Advances in Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry (ASMC) in St. Petersburg and Frontiers in CNS and Oncology Medicinal Chemistry, the first joint ACS-EFMC meeting, held in October Siena. For the latter please find a meeting report in this issue, the St. Petersburg meeting will be featured in the first issue 2008.

From the next issue on we will also include a section “letters to the editor” in order to promote exchange of ideas, thoughts, and visions for the future of Medicinal Chemistry. Once more I also encourage you to register on our web-page www.efmc.info to ensure that we are using the correct E-mail address.

The year 2007 almost passed and the MedChemWatch team wishes you and your family peaceful December holidays and a successful new year.

Gerhard Ecker
Editor