Online Encyclopedia
Medicinal chemistry
Medicinal Chemistry is a branch of chemistry and pharmacy involved with designing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes the study of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their structure-activity relationships.
Medicinal chemistry is a highly interdisciplinary science combining organic chemistry with biochemistry, computational chemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology, statistics, and physical chemistry.
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Process of Drug Discovery
Discovery
The first step of drug discovery involves the identification of new active compounds, often called 'hits'. These 'hits' can come from non-natural or natural sources, and are typically found by screening many compounds for the desired biological properties.
Recent developments in robotics and miniaturization have greatly accelerated and automated this process. Typically, a company will screen over 100,000 individual compounds before moving to the optimization step.
Optimization
The second step of drug discovery involves the synthetic modification of the 'hits' in order to improve the biological properties of the compound pharmacophore . The structure-activity relationships of the pharmacophore play an important part in finding 'lead compounds', which exhibit the most potency, most selectivity, and least toxicity.
(See ADME, QSAR, and Lipinski's Rule of Five)
Development
The final step involves the rendering the 'lead compounds' suitable for use in clinical trials. This involves the optimization of the synthetic route for bulk production, and the preparation of a suitable drug formulation.