Heterocyclic Chemistry at a Glance, Second Edition. John A. Joule and Keith Mills.
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Medicinal chemistry – how drugs function
Heterocycles are extremely important building blocks for (medicinal) drugs and they have dominated the area for
many years. Heterocyclic alkaloids were the active ingredients in many natural remedies long before the development
of modern chemistry and some are still used today, for example morphine derivatives and quinine. Despite the current
hot area of biologics, such as monoclonal antibodies, heterocyclic substances still represent about half of the top 20 best
selling (by value) drugs, as illustrated by the compounds shown below, for 2009.
Rather than using complex systematic chemical names, drugs are given ‘trivial’ generic names and drugs acting
on the same pharmacological basis often have related names, particularly by the word ending, for example
ondansetron and granisetron (both used to relieve nausea), losartan and candesartan (both used to treat hyper-
tension). The manufacturer will also give a proprietary (trade) name to a drug, which is treated as a proper noun
and capitalised. In this chapter, we give fi rst the generic name with, where appropriate, a proprietary name in
parentheses. Note that proprietary names may be different in different countries or when marketed by different
companies.