Cheminformatics and medicinal chemistry

Hi! In this course, I'm going to introduce some concepts and tools of Medicinal Chemistry and Cheminformatics!

Cheminformatics can be understood as an interdisciplinary field. It encompasses the theoretical knowledge of chemistry and the application of informatics. This area is applied in several fields, such as drug development, environmental science, and material science. In this course, we are going to focus on the part of cheminformatics applied to drug discovery. In this introductory course, you'll gain knowledge of chemical databases, drawing of molecular structures, and softwares to analyze physicochemical and structural features of molecules to predict their pharmacokinetic properties, bioactivity, or safety profile.

Medicinal chemistry, on the other hand, is an area where chemistry and pharmacology intersect, and it is directly involved in the process of rational drug development. Its main difference from the traditional drug discovery process is the emphasis on the chemical properties and structure of the chemical compounds investigated to generate possible insights into their biological activities. Medicinal chemistry, therefore, provides the rationale for choosing molecules, deducing their possible pharmacokinetic properties, such as plasma concentration, or biological activity, based on their functional groups, molecular weight, cLogP, etc.

You may like this course if you are interested in...

1. Understanding how molecules can be represented in a linear format file

2. Knowing how to use chemical databases

3. Knowing about physicochemical features that may help to predict oral availability of drug candidates

4. Using free softwares to analyze the structure of molecules to predict physicochemical features

5. Using free softwares to analyze the structure of molecules to predict biological activity

6. Knowing how proteins are relevant to the process of drug discovery

7. Contributing to the field of biochemistry and protein design by playing Foldit