Researchers from BioISI’s Chemistry for Biological Systems Group (Computational Chemistry Lab led by Paulo J. Costa ) published two papers in two prestigious international journals, one in Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery, the other in the  Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation  In these,  Paulo J. Costa, Diogo Vila Viçosa e Rafael Nunes discuss and develop new computational methods that allow the description of an interaction, named halogen bond, which is becoming highly relevant in medicinal chemistry, for instance, in the context of kinase inhibitors for cancer therapy.  These methods could be used to develop new drugs that are more active and less toxic than the current ones, by predicting the solvation energies in water or the prediction of protein-ligand binding energies of drug candidates.