The "New Trends in Virtual Screening" special issue edited by Professor Renxiao Wang from the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, School of Pharmacy, is just published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (American Chemical Society) as the September issue (https://pubs.acs .org/toc/jcisd8/60/9). Virtual screening is the most commonly used technique in modern drug discovery for finding novel hits or lead compounds, which is widely applied in both academia and industry. This technique has lasted for a long time, and it is still being developed forward. This special issue brings together more than 20 papers contributed by researchers from all over the world. Topics cover database construction, new methods and ideas for virtual screening, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and creative applications of virtual screening. Among them, the paper titled "Fragment-Based Computational Method for Designing GPCR Ligands" written jointly by Dr. Yan Li from the Department of Medicinal Chemistry of our college and the Amgen Company is selected as the cover paper of this special issue.
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (JCIM) was first published in 1960, which has remained as the flag journal in the field of cheminformatics and molecular modeling for many years. Professor Renxiao Wang has served as an associate editor of this journal since 2016. He is the first associate editor of JCIM from China in the history of the journal. In terms of the total number of published papers in this journal, the three major contributors are now the United States, Europe, and China. This reflects the fact that with the remarkable efforts of Chinese scientists, their international impact in this professional field is continuously increasing, and the overall quality of their research is close to or reach the first-class level.