Drug design and discovery

It is an exciting time for chemists to be involved in all aspects of biomedical research.

This course is training a new generation of bioscientists to meet challenges at the interface between biology and chemistry, and to apply pharmaceutical and analytical knowledge directly to improve quality of life. Chemistry is inherently well positioned to have a major impact on drug discovery, since other disciplines cannot create novel small molecules. This course offers classical natural products-based drug discovery, involving extraction, assay-based functional fractionation, isolation, characterisation, and target validation. However, increasingly, this approach is complemented by molecular target-based drug discovery and molecular modelling. Discovery of new generation antimicrobials against multidrug resistant strains of bacteria is advancing by extensive use of those modern tools.

The syllabus is designed to develop the analytical techniques and problem-solving skills relevant to postgraduate-level employment in both the pharmaceutical sector but also to provide access to transferable skills relevant to a great variety of professional careers.

Following completion of the Human Genome Project, the pharmaceutical industry is also preparing for a revolution in cancer and inherited disorder therapies. This course is training a new generation of bioscientists to meet challenges at the interface between biology and chemistry, and to apply pharmaceutical and analytical knowledge directly to improve quality of life.

Furthermore nanotechnology is fulfilling medical science’s need for more precise treatments that are less invasive, less costly and less complicated to administer than traditional methods. This translates into better patient outcomes, lower healthcare costs and wider access to healthcare services in under-resourced parts of the world.