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Medicinal chemistry
Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacology involved with designing, synthesizing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes the study of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR). Pharmaceutical chemistry is focused on quality aspects of medicines and aims to assure fitness for the purpose of medicinal products.
Compounds used as medicines are overwhelmingly organic compounds including small organic molecules and biopolymers. However, inorganic compounds and metal-containing compounds have been found to be useful as drugs. For example, the cis-platin series of platinium-containing complexes have found use as anti-cancer agents.
Medicinal chemistry is a highly interdisciplinary science combining organic chemistry with biochemistry, computational chemistry, pharmacology, pharmacognosy, molecular biology, statistics, and physical chemistry.
Process of drug discovery
Discovery
The first step of drug discovery involves the identification of novel active compounds, often called "hits", which are typically found by screening many compounds (compound library) for the desired biological properties. While a number of approaches toward the identification of hits exist, the most successful of techniques relies on chemical and biological intuition developed through years of rigorous chemical-biological training. Other sources of hits can come from natural sources, such as plants, animals, or fungi.
Hits may originate also from random chemical libraries, such as those created through combinatorial chemistry or historic chemical compound collections that are tested en-masse against the biological target in ques