Customer Reviews

The Organic Chemistry of Drug Design and Drug Action, Second Edition

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This is probably the best book of its kind in the vast and multidisciplinary field of drug design and action. Richard Silverman is an acclaimed chemistry professor at Northwestern University, and in this book he provides the most comprehensive and lucid exposition of the chemical basis of drug action that I have seen. No matter how complicated biological systems and their interactions are, at the basic level it's all chemistry, and mostly organic chemistry. Thus, understand the chemistry and you will go a long way in understanding drug action. An organic chemist will find this book extremely illuminating in a way that would not have been made clear through his traditional education.

The book opens with a short but clear discussion of drug discovery, combinatorial chemistry, patents and clinical trials. Then it leads the reader through a variety of enzyme catalyzed reactions, with examples of major drugs studded all the way. Silverman shows us how nature is the master organic chemist, employing the familiar reactions of chemistry in an unsurpassed manner. The chapter on enzyme inhibition is long and detailed and it's breathtaking. This is a key chapter because almost all major drugs act by inhibiting enzymes. The examples which Silverman chooses to illustrate are both important (including many bestselling anticancer, antiviral, and antibiotic drugs to name a few), as well as very interesting. The last parts of the book deal with DNA binding drugs and with pathways of drug metabolism and excretion. Along all the way, the emphasis is on the chemical reactions that drugs undergo, which are after all the key to understanding their properties. The lucidity of the book is such that a beginning graduate or advanced undergraduate well-versed with the basic principles of general and organic chemistry can easily understand all the contents.

I would say that this book is so interesting and illuminating that it's one of the very few academic books which you can enjoyably read cover to cover. In fact it even makes great bedside reading! Truly a must-have book for chemists and biologists of every kind interested in how drugs work.

Some books of this nature tend to focus on the synthesis of drug molecules and less about how they work and why. This book is just the opposite and walks the reader through a logical progression of drug discovery, design and target specificity. This book makes a great introduction to Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics which could be considered the bible of the subject.

This book is fantastic and covers a broad range of topics that fall into the category of rational drug design. The book goes in depth into topics dealing with each important aspect of how drugs are discovered and modified to produce better drugs: from effects of chirality to electronic effects. The structure of drugs, at the molecular level are covered in detail, reflecting every major aspect of drug structure. Then, interaction between drug (ligand) and enzyme, at the molecular level are covered.

In my estimation, to benefit most from this book, the reader should have a working knowledge of organic chemistry and biochemistry (at least protein secondary and tertiary structure).

I think this is a great book. The concepts are easy to understand and the illustrations are helpful. reads like most other chemistry books.

There is a new considerably expanded and updated edition available of Silverman's already classic text as of Jan/04. ISBN is 0-12-643732-7. Check it out... price is comparable to the earlier edition.

The book is great for understanding the title subject. But it has too many references which distracts the reader. Also, many times, the corresponding picture of a particular topic covered is not in the same page as the topic. This requires going back and forth between pages. The problems at the end of each chapter are really good and checks the understanding of the subject thoroughly.

The book was brand new just like it said in the description and it was shipped very fast.