Organic Chemistry focusing on Medicinal Chemistry Topics

Justin Shorb

There is so much overlap into Medicinal Chemistry across the curriculum, but especially in Organic. Thoughts or areas you would love to pursue?

REM

Of course organic synthesis is needed to make drug candidates and optimize leads. That is not really the intellectual content of medicinal chemistry. Medicinal chemistry involves many topics not covered in organic chemistry: diversity oriented synthesis, bio-orthogonal chemistry, biophysical methods, bioisosteres, peptidomimetic chemistry to name a few. These topics now constitute a significant chunk of scientific knowledge, and are generally not covered in the undergraduate curriculum. The students in my Medicinal Chemistry course (Jrs and Srs, mostly Biochem majors) find the topic to be extremely interesting, but they have no previous exposure to the core ideas in modern drug development. That is why I think an Open, living textbook would be of interest.

Justin Shorb

Indeed! I was fortunate to take a Medicinal Chemistry course at the undergraduate level. It counted for a 300-level elective and we studied really simple, but powerful, implementations of essential fields of chemistry like MRI Contrast Agents (how NMR spectroscopy worked with fields), Analytical techniques for analyzing natural product extraction (where I learned most of my matrix effects and standard additions), and even about organic functional groups and how to use target-screening based on derivatives utilized good guesses from organic functional group similarities. Forgive my mis-use of various terms as it was decades ago, but still helped me appreciate the next few stages of my undergraduate studies. Even a set of Learning Objects (where we put case studies, labs, and other modules that could accompany multiple courses or texts) based on Medicinal Chemistry could be a great co-authoring/reviewing team project!