Medicinal chemistry is the process of design, synthesis, and testing of molecules (drugs) for the treatment of infection and disease.
The medicinal-chemistry tag should be applied to all questions relating to this process, from the theoretical aspects of drug design (screening, computational studies, synthesis planning) to the practical aspects of the actual synthesis, characterisation and testing of the molecule.
Medicinal chemistry is an interdisciplinary field in which new biologically active molecules (molecules that interact with a specific biological target to produce a response) are designed and synthesised as potential therapies to treat disease and infection.
Definition:
IUPAC
…medicinal chemistry is a chemistry-based discipline, involving aspects of the biological, medical and pharmaceutical sciences. It is concerned with the invention, discovery, design, identification and preparation of biologically active compounds, the study of their metabolism, the interpretation of their mode of action at the molecular level and the construction of structure-activity relationships (SAR), which is the relation- ship between chemical structure and pharmacological activity for a series of compounds…
Medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry are disciplines at the intersection of chemistry, especially synthetic organic chemistry, and pharmacology and various other biological specialties, where they are involved with design, chemical synthesis and development for market of pharmaceutical agents, or bioactive molecules (drugs).
Applicability of the medicinal-chemistry tag:
- medicinal-chemistry should be applied to any questions about the theory and practice of medicinal chemistry, in both academic and industrial situations.
- the drugs tag is likely to be relevant to many medicinal-chemistry questions (those dealing with specific molecules/classes of molecules), as drugs are the product of medicinal chemistry/the pharmaceutical industry. One exception would be if a question is specifically about the practice of medicinal chemistry without any reference to specific molecules.
- Medicinal chemistry is an umbrella term encompassing several other fields in chemistry, meaning additional tags should be used in addition to medicinal-chemistry, for example:
- questions may deal with the synthesis/manufacture of drugs, in which case organic-chemistry or synthesis are likely appropriate.
- questions may deal with the interaction of drugs with proteins/enzymes or related biological issues, so should have tags representing this. biochemistry or pharmacology could be appropriate depending on the situation. (In these cases the question might also cross a line into biology warranting migration to biology.se).
- questions may deal with computational aspects of predicting properties such as pKa or logD, making computational-chemistry a useful additional tag.
Related tags:
The following tags are related to medicinal-chemistry, with multiple questions on chemistry.se already tagged with one of more of the following which may be useful as additional tags on questions identified as being related to medicinal chemistry:
Further reading:
Several books have been written specifically on medicinal chemistry, however, related books on organic chemistry, pharmacology, biochemistry and physiology could also be consulted for additional information (additional references can be found on the tag pages for the individual topics):
- Patrick, G.; An Introduction to Medicinal Chemistry; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013.
- Abraham, D. J. (ed.); Burger’s Medicinal Chemistry & Drug Discovery; Wiley-Interscience, Unknown.
- Lemke, T. L. (ed.); Foye’s Principles of Medicinal Chemistry; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins: Baltimore, 2013
