An invitation for comprehensive single-compound reviews on the pharmacological properties of newly launched drugs

Abstract

The publication of data on the preclinical and clinical pharmacology of compounds for the diagnosis, prevention, or treatment of human or animal disease is a core business of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology and of most other pharmacology journals. This includes studies characterizing emerging drugs (Billman et al. 2012; Igawa et al. 2012) or describing newly discovered properties of established drugs (Bertera et al. 2012b; Chauhan et al. 2012). This not only applies to pharmacodynamics but also to pharmacokinetics (Bertera et al. 2012a; Lameh et al. 2012), drug metabolism (Ehrlichova et al. 2012; Wustrow et al. 2012), and effects of drug metabolites (Deng and Fang 2012), as well as toxicology (Betto et al. 2012; Kushwaha and Jena 2012). Notably, besides studies on small molecules, those on biologics (Murakami et al. 2012) and vaccines (Lorin et al. 2012) are also within the scope of pharmacology journals. As such data similarly come from investigators in academia and in the pharmaceutical industry, many of the editors and editorial board members of NaunynSchmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology presently do or previously have worked in the pharmaceutical industry, including the authors of this manuscript. Pharmacological data not only deepen our understanding of drug action but also can contribute to guiding treatment paradigms. Hence, they are important to a much wider audience than only scientists in drug discovery and academic pharmacology. Particularly at the time surrounding the launch of new drugs, it is important to comprehensively inform scientists and physicians on the pharmacological properties of new medications. However, even specialized academic physicians often find it hard to systematically access pharmacological information on new drugs. While reviews on new drugs are frequently published, they typically focus on clinical data and contain only limited information on their pharmacological properties. Therefore, we see a need to make the available pharmacological evidence on new drugs more accessible to the general public. In this vein, NaunynSchmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology explicitly welcomes review articles which comprehensively summarize the available pharmacological data for individual compounds. In the following section, we provide guidance on the scope and format of such manuscripts and will also outline the journal's editorial policy on such review manuscripts. We anticipate that such single compound reviews will largely be devoted to drugs which will imminently become available for clinical use or have recently been introduced into the market. However, review articles on the pharmacology of more established drugs will also be welcome if they provide new clinically meaningful insight. Such reviews should be comprehensive, i.e., contain all publicly available data including those generated by investigators with no affiliation to the drug sponsor. Authors can either limit the scope of their manuscript to nonclinical findings or can expand it to also cover the pharmacokinetic data if the latter is also covered comprehensively. The manuscripts should largely be based on published or in press full papers which have undergone peer review. Abstracts of data not yet published in full original articles should also comprehensively be included, but should M. C. Michel (*) Department of Pharmacology, Johannes Gutenberg University, Obere Zahlbacher Str. 67, 51101 Mainz, Germany e-mail: marmiche@uni-mainz.de