Grand challenges in chemical biology: Past, present and future

Chemical Biology is an interdisciplinary field that is limited only by the imagination of its practitioners. For chemists, Chemical Biology provides a field to explore new chemistry with biological relevance. For biologists, Chemical Biology provides a field in which to consider how chemical principles can be applied to fundamental biological questions. The value of such studies has become apparent with the onset of the worldwide spread of COVID SARS-CoV-2. This pandemic forced scientists to consider regulatory processes involved in infection and to develop novel chemistry for the preparation of vaccines and treatments that modulated those processes. Moreover, COVID has taught us that the chemistry of biology systems, as a function of mutations and evolution, is constantly changing to create biological organisms displaying improved survival and adaption mechanisms. The journal Frontiers in Chemical Biology, by placing chemistry on center stage, will emphasize the development of new innovative approaches to the study of biological problems at the intersection of chemistry and biology and resulting advances in biology, medicine and the life sciences.