10^th World Congress on Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Design June 14-15, 2018 Barcelona, Spain

Pharmacology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of drug action, where a drug can be broadly defined as any man-made, natural, or endogenous (from within body) molecule which exerts a biochemical or physiological effect on the cell, tissue, organ, or organism (sometimes the word pharmacon is used as a term to encompass these endogenous and exogenous bioactive species). More specifically, it is the study of the interactions that occur between a living organism and chemicals that affect normal or abnormal biochemical function. If substances have medicinal properties, they are considered pharmaceuticals.

The field encompasses drug composition and properties, synthesis and drug design, molecular and cellular mechanisms, organ/systems mechanisms, signal transduction/cellular communication, molecular diagnostics, interactions, toxicology, chemical biology, therapy, and medical applications and antipathogenic capabilities.

Toxicology is a discipline, overlapping with biology, chemistry, pharmacology, medicine, and nursing, that involves the study of the adverse effects of chemical substances on living organisms and the practice of diagnosing and treating exposures to toxins and toxicants. The relationship between dose and its effects on the exposed organism is of high significance in toxicology. Factors that influence chemical toxicity include the dosage (and whether it is acute or chronic), route of exposure, species, age, sex, and environment

The pharmaceutical sciences are a group of interdisciplinary areas of study concerned with the design, action, delivery, and disposition of drugs. Pharmaceutical Sciences is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field that aims to integrate fundamental principles of physical and organic chemistry, engineering, biochemistry, and biology to understand how to optimize delivery of drugs to the body and translate this integrated understanding into new and improved therapies against human disease. Pharmacy is the science and technique of preparing and dispensing drugs. It is a health profession that links health sciences with chemical sciences and aims to ensure the safe and effective use of pharmaceutical drugs.

The scope of pharmacy practice includes more traditional roles such as compounding and dispensing medications, and it also includes more modern services related to health care, including clinical services, reviewing medications for safety and efficacy, and providing drug information.

The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications. Pharmaceutical companies may deal in generic or brand medications and medical devices. The modern pharmaceutical industry traces its roots to two sources. The first of these were local apothecaries that expanded from their traditional role distributing botanical drugs such as morphine and quinine to wholesale manufacture in the mid-1800s. Rational drug discovery from plants started particularly with the isolation of morphine, analgesic and sleep-inducing agent from opium. By the late 1880s, German dye manufacturers had perfected the purification of individual organic compounds from coal tar and other mineral sources and had also established rudimentary methods in organic chemical synthesis. The development of synthetic chemical methods allowed scientists to systematically vary the structure of chemical substances and growth in the emerging science of pharmacology expanded their ability to evaluate the biological effects of these structural changes.

Organic chemistry is the study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of carbon-containing compounds, which include not only hydrocarbons but also compounds with any number of other elements, including hydrogen (most compounds contain at least one carbon–hydrogen bond), nitrogen, oxygen, halogens, phosphorus, silicon, and sulfur. This branch of chemistry was originally limited to compounds produced by living organisms but has been broadened to include human-made substances such as plastics. The range of application of organic compounds is enormous and includes, but is not limited to, pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, food, explosives, paints, and cosmetics. Organic chemistry is a highly creative science in which chemists create new molecules and explore the properties of existing compounds. It is the most popular field of study for ACS chemists and Ph.D. chemists. Organic compounds are all around us. They are central to the economic growth of the United States in the rubber, plastics, fuel, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, detergent, coatings, dyestuff, and agrichemical industries, to name a few. The very foundations of biochemistry, biotechnology, and medicine are built on organic compounds and their role in life processes. Many modern, high-tech materials are at least partially composed of organic compounds. Organic chemists spend much of their time creating new compounds and developing better ways of synthesizing previously known compounds.

Medicinal chemistry is by nature an interdisciplinary science, and practitioners have a strong background in organic chemistry, which must eventually be coupled with a broad understanding of biological concepts related to cellular drug targets. Scientists in medicinal chemistry work are principally industrial scientists, working as part of an interdisciplinary team that uses their chemistry abilities, especially, their synthetic abilities, to use chemical principles to design effective therapeutic agents.    

Medicinal chemistry in its most common practice focusing on small organic molecules—encompasses synthetic organic chemistry and aspects of natural products and computational chemistry in close combination with chemical biology, enzymology and structural biology, together aiming at the discovery and development of new therapeutic agents. At the biological interface, medicinal chemistry combines to form a set of highly interdisciplinary sciences, setting its organic, physical, and computational emphases alongside biological areas such as biochemistry, molecular biology, pharmacognosy and pharmacology, toxicology and veterinary and human medicine

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 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 pre-clinical 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.

Use of computational techniques in drug discovery and development process is rapidly gaining in popularity, implementation and appreciation. Different terms are being applied to this area, including computer-aided drug design (CADD), computational drug design, computer-aided molecular design (CAMD), computer-aided molecular modeling (CAMM), rational drug design, in silico drug design, computer-aided rational drug design. Term Computer-Aided Drug Discovery and Development (CADDD) will be employed in this overview of the area to cover the entire process. Both computational and experimental techniques in chemistry have important roles in drug discovery and drug development and represent complementary approaches

Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry is a scientific journal focusing on the results of research on the molecular structure of biological organisms and the interaction of biological targets with chemical agents.

Anticancer, or antineoplastic, drugs are used to cure malignancies or cancerous growths. Drug therapy may be used alone or in combination with other treatments such as surgery or radiation therapy, the use of natural products has been the single most successful strategy in the discovery of novel medicines.

Plants need to defend themselves from attack by micro-organisms, fungi, and they do this by producing anti-fungal chemicals that are toxic to fungi. Because fungal and human cells are similar at a biochemical level it is often the case that chemical compounds intended for plant defense have an inhibitory effect on human cells, including human cancer cells. Those plant chemicals that are selectively more toxic to cancer cells than normal cells have been discovered in screening programs and developed as chemotherapy drugs.

Analytical chemistry consists of classical, wet chemical methods and modern instrumental methods. Classical qualitative methods use separations techniques such as precipitation, extraction, and distillation. Identification may be based on differences in color, odor, melting point, boiling point, radioactivity or reactivity. Classical quantitative analysis uses mass or volume changes to quantify amount. Instrumental methods may be used to separate samples using chromatography, electrophoresis or field flow fractionation. Then qualitative and quantitative analysis can be performed, often with the same instrument and may use light interaction, heat interaction, electric fields or magnetic fields. Often the same instrument can separate, identify and quantify an analyte.