Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Overview

Members of the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Group have expertise in:

• pharmaceutical analysis
• organic, biological and medicinal chemistry
• drug design and disposition
• computational chemistry

As a result of the variety of expertise available within the group collaborative research projects involve colleagues in Pharmaceutics, Pharmacology and the Practice and Clinical sections in the Department of Pharmacy and School of Life and Medical Sciences together with the Topical Drug Delivery and Toxicology (TDDT) and Clinical Practice, Medicines Safety and Drugs of Misuse (Clin-Safe-Drug) Research Centres.

Members of the group are also involved in joint research projects with colleagues in the School of Engineering and Technology.

What the discipline covers/does

The Medicinal Chemistry Group is involved in drug design, using computational approaches, and syntheses of molecules against a number of biological targets including anti-oxidants, anticancer agents and the design and synthesis of agents which influence NO (Nitrous Oxide) synthesis.

Other areas under investigation are the isolation, structural elucidation and synthesis of natural products of pharmacological interest, together with the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, with a particular interest in chlorosulphonation reactions and click chemistry.

Areas of interest in Pharmaceutical Analysis include method development using separation science techniques, e.g. GC, HPLC, CE, chiral chromatography, LC-MS/MS and GC-MS, and structural elucidation of drug degradation products and metabolites in biological fluids by NMR and MS, together with vibrational spectroscopy e.g. Raman spectroscopy, NIR, FTIR and atomic spectroscopic techniques, e.g. ICP for trace metal analysis in pharmaceutical products and herbal remedies.  

Members of the group are active on a number of Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Committees, including:

• the Heterocyclic and Synthesis Group,
• the East Anglia Region of the Analytical Division
• the Council of the Analytical Division

We also have members of the editorial boards of Bioanalysis (Future Publishing), Analytical Abstracts (RSC) and Acta Facultatis Pharmaceuticae Universitatis Comenianae (Faculty of Pharmacy, Comenius University); interact with regulatory agencies e.g. BP Secretariat of the MHRA; and have collaborations with the Faculty of Pharmacy, Comenius University, Bratislava.

Key projects

• Chemical Fingerprinting of Herbal Remedies using Multiple Analytical Techniques and Chemometrics.     
• Chemistry and Analysis of “Legal Highs”.       
• Computational approaches for the prediction of aqueous solubility.      
• Design and Synthesis of Chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of Pancreatic Cancer.      
• Contextualisation of Chemistry within the Pharmacy curriculum.