Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Design

Medicinal Chemistry, Computational Drug Design, Heterocyclic Drugs

This module provides an introduction to important concepts in medicinal chemistry, computational drug design and heterocyclic drugs:

(i) Medicinal Chemistry. Material covered includes the purpose and principles of medicinal chemistry in the drug discovery, design and development process, pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic aspects of drug action in the context of chemical structure, structure-activity relationships for optimization of lead compounds and sources and approaches to the discovery of lead compounds.

(ii) Introduction to computational drug design. Material covered includes structure and ligand based techniques for hit compound discovery and hit-to-lead optimization, molecular modelling, pharmacophore and chemoinformatics in drug design.

(ii) Heterocyclic drugs. Material covered includes an introduction to the different types of heterocycles found in nature and as part of drugs and their physicochemical characteristics and mechanism of action of heterocyclic drugs such as antibiotics, antiviral drugs, anticancer agents and heterocyclic drugs acting in CNS and in heart disease.