The Department of Medicinal Chemistry is one the oldest departments in the School of Pharmacy which was established in 1963. The major mission of this Department is to create new knowledge for the discovery and development of new pharmaceutical drugs. Since twenty years ago, the mission was developed to conduct basic research in chemistry and biological chemistry as it is related to drug discovery, teaching these principles in the professional and graduate programs, and providing services to the scientific community. The scope of this field is sufficiently broad to give students with many different science backgrounds a rewarding and challenging program of study. Areas of active interest include drug discovery, organic synthesis of medicinal agents, natural product chemistry, prodrugs, molecular modeling, and pharmaceutical analysis. There is a broad range of research projects that introduce new analytical methods for determination of drugs in pharmaceutical dosage forms and biological fluids.
Current major research programs are :
• Discovery and validation of new anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, anti Alzheimer and anti-hypertension drugs
• Computational modeling and simulation of biomolecular structures, dynamics and interactions
• Isolation and identification of natural products
• Application of Mass, NMR and other spectrophotometry techniques to the elucidation of natural products and small molecular structures
• Synthesis and evaluation of novel biopolymers for site-targeted drug delivery
• Synthesis of new chromogenic and fluorogenic markers for analysis of elements and drugs
• Development of new analytical methods for determination and identification of chemical compounds and drugs in different matrix.
At the moment, the Department includes 13 faculty members, six full professor, five associate professor, and two assistant professor. Other staff include several organic and analytical chemists with M.Sc. and B.Sc. degree who work in different laboratories of the Department.