Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Pharmaceutical chemistry is a scientific discipline that designs and synthesizes active substances capable of producing the targeted biological effect in living systems and elucidates their structures. It also studies the changes an active substance undergoes in the body, known as metabolites. In its early days, pharmaceutical chemistry carried out molecular modifications on compounds with known pharmacological activity; over time, with advances in molecular biology and technology, it gained the ability to study the molecular-level interactions of active substances with the relevant proteins using computer-based systems and came to be called medicinal chemistry.

A pharmaceutical chemist needs a solid knowledge of organic and analytical chemistry to design, synthesize and analyze drug molecules, as well as knowledge of biochemistry, pharmacology and molecular biology to understand the mechanisms of action, side effects and toxic effects of the synthesized compounds and to develop molecules that minimize these unwanted effects.

Within the Department of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry, the aims are:

• Computer-aided drug design to develop suitable active substances against the protein involved in the target disease,
• Establishing suitable synthesis methods for these designed compounds,
• Carrying out structure elucidation studies on the synthesized compounds,
• Investigating the structure–activity relationships of candidate molecules,
• Chemically modifying currently used compounds to improve their physicochemical properties and converting them into prodrugs.