The front cover artwork is provided by César A. Zapata‐Acevedo and co‐workers at the Institute of Chemistry of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the IMDEA Materials Institute, the University of Manchester and Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Santa Fe. The image shows the fragment‐based drug design process for candidate Zimlovisertib. The Interacting Quantum Atoms method reveals the adequacy (or lack of) of the chemical changes throughout the design of this IRAK4 inhibitor. Read the full text of the Research Article at 10.1002/cphc.202200455.

The interaction of the thumb site II of the NS5B protein of hepatitis C virus and a pair of drug candidates was studied using a topological energy decomposition method called interacting quantum atoms (IQA). The atomic energies were then processed by the relative energy gradient (REG) method, which extracts chemical insight by computation based on minimal assumptions. REG reveals the most important IQA energy contributions, by atom and energy type (electrostatics, sterics, and exchange–correlation), that are responsible for the behaviour of the whole system, systematically from a short-range ligand–pocket interaction until a distance of approximately 22 Å. The degree of covalency in various key interatomic interactions can be quantified. No exchange–correlation contribution is responsible for the changes in the energy profile of both pocket–ligand systems investigated in the ligand–pocket distances equal to or greater than that of the global minimum. Regarding the hydrogen bonds in the system, a “neighbour effect” was observed thanks to the REG method, which states that a carbon atom would rather not have its covalent neighbour oxygen form a hydrogen bond. The combination of IQA and REG enables the automatic identification of the pharmacophore in the ligands. The coarser Interacting Quantum Fragments (IQF) enables the determination of which amino acids of the pocket contribute most to the binding and the type of energy of said binding. This work is an example of the contribution topological energy decomposition methods can make to fragment-based drug design.