The focus of this textbook is on application, rather than pure knowledge transfer of the results of all chemical biological work (which would also be beyond the scope of a book). It gives the reader, through the specific selection of chemical biological techniques and concepts, the necessary tools to be able to develop new ways of thinking and thus new therapeutic options in the complex field of chemical biology and drug development. The stated aim of this book is to provide concrete solutions and inspiration to students, (post)graduate students, and experienced scientists at universities as well as in industry in their problems. After an introduction to the problems addressed by chemical biology in drug discovery, the three levels of molecular biology dogma: DNA, RNA and proteins and their role as drug targets serve as the common thread of this book.This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Chemische Biologie by Marco F. Schmidt, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Marco F. Schmidt is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of biotx.ai Inc. which develops Artificial Intelligence for biomedical data analysis. Together with his team, he researches how machine learning can be used to identify drug targets and predict the clinical effect of drug candidates. He studied biochemistry at the FU Berlin and in Tübingen, received his PhD in chemical biology at the FMP Berlin and worked on new drug concepts at the University of Cambridge.