Introduction to MedChem and drug repurposing

What is medicinal chemistry?

Medicinal chemistry is a field of research which combines many disciplines, including chemistry and pharmacy. A medicinal chemist is tasked with designing and synthesising compounds which can be used as medicines, and investigating how the structure affects biological activity. Since medicines are often organic (carbon-based) compounds, medicinal chemists must also be skilled in organic chemical synthesis.

The field of medicinal chemistry has existed, in some sense, since ancient times. People have cured illnesses for thousands of years by chewing certain herbs, barks, berries, and roots – plants which we now know contain natural products with medicinal properties. In modern times, medicinal chemists might take inspiration from these plant-derived medicines to design even better drugs which are capable of treating all kinds of diseases!

One example is aspirin, a mild pain-relief medication. This is one of the drugs you will be repurposing as part of this study. Natural products related to aspirin, such as salicin and salicylic acid, are found in the bark and leaves of willow trees. In ancient times, the Sumerian and Egyptian people used willow bark to treat pain, fever, and inflammation.

Drug repurposing

What is "drug repurposing"? Drug repurposing is a very popular practice in drug discovery, which aims to identify new uses for existing drugs which have already been approved for therapeutic use. This is relatively low-risk, and lower cost, since it often takes less time to repurpose a drug, than design a completely new one!

Read the following reviews on drug repurposing. Select one of the drugs mentioned, and prepare an infographic. Be sure to include the name of the drug, what it is used to treat, and what it was repurposed from. Also include how the differences in the structure of the repurposed drug have changed its function to make it more suitable for its new purpose! 

What will we be doing?

In this depth study, we will become medicinal chemists.

In the first workshop, we will get experience using molinspiration, online tool which can predict some key structure/function relationships of organic compounds. This is an important part of drug design – before we start synthesising all kinds of drugs, with no idea how they will act in the body, we instead model some of their properties and pick the best candidates to take forward and synthesise.

The next lessons are complementary to the synthetic component of the study. We will go through 3 analytical techniques – NMR, IR, and MS – that medicinal chemists use every day to identify what drug molecule they have made. We will cover the theory behind each technique, instrumentation, and how to analyse the data we collect.