About

Medicinal/Pharmaceutical chemistry deals with the discovery, design, development and both pharmacological and analytical characterization of drug materials. Medicinal chemists should have different knowledges including chemistry (synthetic organic chemistry), and pharmacology and various other biological specialties. They are involved with design, chemical synthesis and development for market of medicinal agents, or bioactive molecules.

Compounds used as medicines are most often organic compounds, which are often divided into the broad classes of small organic molecules (e.g., acetaminophen, salbutamol, aspirin) and "biologics" (rituximab, erythropoietin, insulin), the latter of which are most often medicinal preparations of proteins (natural and recombinant antibodies, hormones etc.). Inorganic and organometallic compounds are also valuable as drugs (e.g., lithium and cisplatin as well as zinc).

In particular, medicinal chemistry is focusing on small organic molecules includes synthetic organic chemistry and features of natural products and computational chemistry in close combination with chemical biology, enzymology and structural biology, together targeting at the discovery and development of new therapeutic agents. Practically speaking, it involves chemical aspects of identification, and then systematic, thorough synthetic alteration of new chemical entities to make them suitable for therapeutic use. It includes synthetic and computational aspects of the study of existing drugs and agents in development in relation to their bioactivities, i.e., understanding their structure-activity relationships (SAR). Pharmaceutical chemistry is focused on quality features of drugs and purposes to guarantee appropriateness for purpose of medicinal products. The research interests of the members of medicinal chemistry department of pharmacy faculty of are drug design and synthesis, computational chemistry (molecular modeling, molecular dynamic simulation, virtual screening) drug delivery, preparing nano-targeted delivery systems of therapeutic agents (chemotherapeutic agents), cancer treatment, nanomaterials and biosensors.