270071 VO Essentials in Pharmaceutical drug discovery & development (2014W)

Drug discovery is highly interdisciplinary drawing from Chemistry, Biology and Biophysics. We look at: 1. Drug Discovery: Drug discovery in industry & in academia ; What are the process steps in Drug discovery and Development; Classes of Drug targets; High-throughput screening and other methods to identify starting points; Assay types and characterization, Fluorenscence - essential tool in drug discovery; Chemistry and properties of fluorescent dyes; 2. Druglikeness: What drugs look like and how they act; Hit - lead - drug properties and predictions; 3. Drug development strategies: Drug classes and their development hurdles; Approaches for optimization of drug properties; Medicinal chemistry at work - examples; Thermodynamics of ligand-receptor interactions; In-vitro profiling and non-linear curve fitting; 4. Drug delivery & in-vivo profiling: Strategies for drug delivery; Preclinical in-vivo characterization of drug candidates, ADME; Clinical development; 5. Scale-up for industrial production: Process design, scale-up, methodologies; 6. Regulatory aspects and Quality systems in the pharmaceutical & food industry: Registration process, FDA & EMA, Principles of quality systems, GMP, GLP in the working environment.