Rational Drug Design - PHPH3101

Starting with an overview of issues relating to the commercialization of intellectual property using examples from industry, the course will build on the information gained in PHPH2011 and PHPH3251 in relation to the process of rational drug design. This will include examination of protein structure and structure-prediction methods as well as an introduction to bioinformatics. Methods for drug binding site analysis, molecular docking and binding energy determinations of existing and predicted molecules/drugs will be studied. Segments on computational techniques in pharmacokinetics and toxicology and virtual screening will be included, as well as an introduction to drug target selection and validation. The laboratory classes will cover basic techniques of computational pharmacology, including molecular visualisation, computational protein/DNA-ligand docking and binding site determinations.