Publisher's Synopsis
Medicinal chemistry is a scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacology involved with designing, synthesizing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry is a highly interdisciplinary science combining organic chemistry with biochemistry, computational chemistry, pharmacology, pharmacognosy, molecular biology, statistics, and physical chemistry. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes the study of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR). Pharmaceutical chemistry is focused on quality aspects of medicines and aims to assure fitness for the purpose of medicinal products. The primary objective of medicinal chemistry is the design and discovery of new compounds that are suitable for use as drugs. The discovery of a new drug requires not only its design and synthesis but also the development of testing methods and procedures, which are needed to establish how a substance operates in the body and its suitability for use as a drug.
