I’ve just been sent details of a new medicinal chemistry course.

Medicinal Chemistry: The Molecular Basis of Drug Discovery

This course explores how to bring a drug from concept to market, and how a drug's chemical structure relates to its biological function. The course opens with an introduction to the drug approval process. This introduction combines the social, economic, and ethical aspects of drug discovery. Topics include how diseases are selected for treatment, the role of animal testing, and the costs of various discovery phases. The course then focuses on the scientific side of drug discovery. Topics include how drugs interact with biological molecules, drug absorption and elimination, and the discovery of weakly active molecules and their optimization into viable drugs.

The course starts 10 March, it is estimated the course will require 6-8 hours per week and runs for 7 weeks. The course was organised by Erland Stevens who wrote the medchem textbook Medicinal Chemistry: The Modern Drug Discovery Process.