Lecture

Interrogating SAR in Medical Chemistry

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In course

CH-332: Medicinal chemistry

Sitting at the crossroad of organic chemistry and medicine, this course outlines how an initial hit compound transitions into a lead candidate, and ultimately a drug, in the modern drug discovery world. Note: the course is held only during 2nd half of spr ...

Description

This lecture introduces the fundamentals of medicinal chemistry, focusing on the interrogation of Structure-Activity Relationships (SAR) in drug design. Topics include the multidisciplinary nature of medicinal chemistry, the limited synthetic toolbox available to med chemists, the importance of high-throughput screening (HTS) in lead discovery, and key milestones to reduce late-stage attrition of drug candidates. The lecture also covers the concepts of reversible vs. irreversible binders, compound selectivity in SAR evaluations, and the considerations for setting up small-molecule HTS. Practical examples and case studies are used to illustrate these concepts.

Instructor

Yimon Aye

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Health sciences

Pharmacology: Drug discovery

Related concepts (32)

Hit to lead

Hit to lead (H2L) also known as lead generation is a stage in early drug discovery where small molecule hits from a high throughput screen (HTS) are evaluated and undergo limited optimization to identify promising lead compounds. These lead compounds undergo more extensive optimization in a subsequent step of drug discovery called lead optimization (LO).

Drug discovery

In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery, as with penicillin. More recently, chemical libraries of synthetic small molecules, natural products or extracts were screened in intact cells or whole organisms to identify substances that had a desirable therapeutic effect in a process known as classical pharmacology.

Drug design

Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is most commonly an organic small molecule that activates or inhibits the function of a biomolecule such as a protein, which in turn results in a therapeutic benefit to the patient. In the most basic sense, drug design involves the design of molecules that are complementary in shape and charge to the biomolecular target with which they interact and therefore will bind to it.

Drug development

Drug development is the process of bringing a new pharmaceutical drug to the market once a lead compound has been identified through the process of drug discovery. It includes preclinical research on microorganisms and animals, filing for regulatory status, such as via the United States Food and Drug Administration for an investigational new drug to initiate clinical trials on humans, and may include the step of obtaining regulatory approval with a new drug application to market the drug.

Fragment-based lead discovery

Fragment-based lead discovery (FBLD) also known as fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) is a method used for finding lead compounds as part of the drug discovery process. Fragments are small organic molecules which are small in size and low in molecular weight. It is based on identifying small chemical fragments, which may bind only weakly to the biological target, and then growing them or combining them to produce a lead with a higher affinity. FBLD can be compared with high-throughput screening (HTS).

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