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FDA-Approved Drugs Containing Amide Functionality in the Last Five Years (2021-2025): Pharmaceutical Use, Trends and Synthetic Approaches

Benedetto Tiz D

Medicines (Basel, Switzerland), 2026

Abstract

The amide functional group remains a cornerstone of medicinal chemistry, serving as an indispensable scaffold in the design of modern therapeutics. This review presents an analysis of FDA-approved drugs (small molecules and peptides with MW ®), amides form the structural backbone of peptidomimetics, enabling high-affinity binding to a viral protease. In precision oncology, as seen with adagrasib (Krazati®), the amide acts as a critical, metabolically stable linker that positions a covalent warhead for selective inhibition of a mutant kinase. This analysis underscores that amide's unique combination of planarity, resonance stabilization, and capacity for robust hydrogen bonding continues to make it an essential element in the medicinal chemist's toolkit, underpinning the development of next-generation therapeutics across oncology, infectious diseases, and neurology. To provide a practical framework for drug discovery, the synthetic routes for each drug are detailed, with particular emphasis placed on the key amide-forming strategies employed.

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