This book, as is often the case with many others, represents an attempt to express a long overdue need of compiling information which has accumulated over the course of more than 30 years of our work in the area of the synthesis of medical drugs and 7 years of work on the book itself. In our opinion, the result can fill obvious gaps that exist in literature of this kind.
This book turned out to be different than what was originally planned. It was intended to show the synthesis of medications in action. For a few drugs, it was aimed at showing the synthesis of a body of potentially active substances that came about as a result of collaboration between chemists, biologists, pharmacologists, toxicologists, and others of various specialties. New drugs sometimes resulted from the application of capabilities provided by a new reagent or by a newly accessible derived substance. It was intended to briefly touch on the history of formation for at least a few drugs. We would like to share certain curious incidents that occurred while working with them, and to share the extremely curious histories behind the creation of their names and likewise the interesting histories associated with the change in the area of medicinal usage after undergoing clinical trials. However, at this moment in time, we understand that we are crossing the borders of the possible size for one book, and this work cannot be completed by a reasonable deadline. Therefore, with few alternative approaches, we decided on the proposed, realistic option of presenting the synthesis of various groups of drugs in basically the same manner in which they are traditionally presented in pharmacological curriculum. This was done with a very specific goal—to harmonize the chemical aspects with the pharmacological curriculum that is studied by future physicians and pharmacists.
Practically every chapter begins with a universally accepted definition of the drug, the present model of its activity, a brief description of every group, classification of the medications to be examined, and also with a description of specific syntheses, each of which relates to the usage of the given drug. Of the thousands of drugs in circulation on the pharmaceutical market, these are mainly medicinal drugs that are included under their generic names in the ‘Essential List of Drugs’ that is recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
For practically all of the 700+ drugs, which is more than twice the number of those on “The List”, references to the methods of synthesis (around 2350) are given along with the most widespread synonyms. However, in an attempt to avoid any misunderstanding, the names are given only as their basic generic names. The largest chapter, Antibiotics, does not formally belong in the book under that name, but since the primary attention of this chapter is focused on the description of the synthetic portions of the derivation of semisynthetic antibiotics, we think that it should definitely be included in this book.
