What you will study
Organic chemistry is a subject that impacts on our daily lives in many different ways but none perhaps more so than in the production of drugs and healthcare products. ‘Histamine discovery could help insomniacs’; ‘Drug may reverse MS brain damage’; ‘Statins prevent artery aging’; these headlines from the media draw attention to progress in the development of new substances for use in healthcare and disease-prevention. Of equal significance is the increasing insight into the molecular basis of many diseases that has deepened the understanding of how drug molecules interact with molecular targets such as proteins. This insight is one of the key drivers behind much of the design and development of new drugs. The module explores, using case studies and online multimedia tools, the many facets of the complex process involved in the discovery, design and synthesis of such substances.
The module is designed to stimulate your interest in, and increase your knowledge and understanding of, organic chemistry through its role in the design and synthesis of molecules with medical applications. It introduces a wide range of reactions in use today for the synthesis of organic compounds in chemical research and in industry.
The detailed aims of the module are to:
Introduce a range of organic reactions of particular value for the synthesis of given molecules with specified structures and stereochemistry. The emphasis is on modern reactions capable of a high degree of selectivity and on the mechanistic basis of that selectivity.
Introduce the concepts of drug and receptor interactions and the role the shape and physical properties of a drug play in this interaction. Molecular modelling will show the effect that modifying these properties has on the interaction and how this can inform the drug design process.
Engage you, through case studies, to the process of selecting and synthesising likely drug molecules and consider in a variety of factors that require evaluation of two or more different routes to the same compound.
Improve your skills as an independent learner by gradually introducing more unstructured materials; for example, developing your ability to extract information from the chemical literature and use databases and molecular modelling to solve a given problem to do with the design and synthesis of drug target compounds.
The module is arranged in ten units, divided into two parts. The first part deals with drug design and discovery and covers topics including molecular modelling, protein structure, enzymes and receptors, and the pharmacokinetics of drug action, enzyme kinetics, drug adsorption, distribution, excretion, metabolism and toxicity. Treatments of electronic theory and stereochemistry illustrate the principles of the shape, reactivity and stability of the drug molecules and how these determine the interaction with a protein target.
The second part focuses on the synthesis of drug molecules. The rationale of synthetic strategies is discussed, providing the basis for understanding a wide variety of types of reaction and of organic reactivity in general; special attention is given to the use of selective reactions to achieve a particular molecular transformation.
The case studies illustrate in detail the use of both theoretical concepts and synthetic techniques developed in the module.