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Introduction to Medicinal Chemistry

Prof. Isabel Rozas

Lecture 1	History of medicinal chemistry. What is medicinal chemistry? What is a drug?
Lecture 2	Drug safety. The therapeutic index. How a drug exerts its activity? Main phases of drug activity.
Lecture 3	Pharmaceutical Phase. Pharmacokinetic phase: ADME properties (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism and Elimination) of a drug. Absorption: types of absorption and the role of the pKa and logP of a drug in its absorption.
Tutorial 1	pKa in drug absorption
Lecture 4	Pharmacokinetic phase, continuation. Distribution. Metabolism. Elimination
Lecture 5	Pharmacokinetic parameters: Lipinski rule of 5, clearance, bioavailability, volume of distribution, elimination rate.
Lecture 6	Drug toxicity. Pharmacodynamic phase. Targets: (phospho)lipids, proteins, glyco-lipids/-proteins, nucleic acids.
Lecture 7	Drug-target theories. Drug-Target interactions (covalent bonds, electrostatic, dipole-dipole, charge transfer, van der Waals, hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic).
Lecture 8	How drugs interact with all possible targets considered: phospholipids, protein receptors (agonism/antagonism).
Lecture 9	Protein as targets: enzymes. Different types of inhibition and inhibitors (reversible inhibition, irreversible inhibition, transition state inhibitors).
Tutorial 2	Targeting enzymes: dihydrofolate reductase.
Lecture 10	Nucleic acids as targets. DNA binding (intercalation, alkylation, minor groove binding). Guanine-quadruplexes.
Lecture 11	Drug discovery process: Design and synthesis steps. Identification of a target. Finding a hit/lead compound: serendipity, high-throughput screening (combinatorial chemistry, natural products).
Tutorial 3	Biological evaluation: dose-response curves.
Lecture 12	Optimization process. Structural variations: pharmacophore and bioisosterism.
Tutorial 4	Pharmacophore and bioisosterism examples and salt forms.
Lecture 13	Computer assisted drug design. Molecular modelling: computational methods (ab initio, DFT, molecular dynamics). QSAR: 2D and 3D. “Me-too” drugs.
Lecture 14	Drug development stages: Pre-clinical studies, Clinical phases (1, 2 and 3) and Post-marketing control.

 

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