During my time as a Ph.D. candidate, I was tasked with creating a research proposal as part of my penultimate meeting with my doctoral committee. I was genuinely excited to take a step back from my day-to-day research and create a plan for a totally new project. Unfortunately, my advisor limited me to make proposals […]
Category Archives: Drug Discovery
In terms of drug design, there’s the important question of what biologically relevant molecule to target for therapeutic effects. In terms of leishmanial drug discovery, a very interesting new co-crystal structure was deposited in the protein data bank. The structure an allosteric inhibitor of Leishmania major co-crystallized with methionyl-tRNA synthetase. This interesting X-ray structure represents […]
A lot has been said about the residence time, or binding kinetics, of small molecules to their targets. Drug binding kinetics has gained increased attention in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology due to its potentially stronger correlation to in vivo efficacy of drugs relative to a drugs thermodynamic affinity for its target. Since this is a […]
About 3 years ago one of my key undergraduate professors, Alisson Shakarian, passed away. It was very shocking news since she was relatively young in age. My experiences with her were positive despite other students complaining about the difficulty of the class. Cell biology and biochemistry II were incredibly informative classes and she did a […]
Medicine can be approached very differently based on one’s guiding principles. For example, one might take the proverb, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” as the defining philosophy to medicine. This would be advantageous with respect to pathologies that are easily exacerbated by attempts to treat them. For example, a person taking antibiotics to […]
One of the reasons the human body is so mysterious is because it is a highly coupled system. A coupled system responds as a whole anytime a single subsystem is changed. Examples of this phenomenon include how psychological stress can lead to problems in other systems of the body such as the digestive system. In […]
14
Jul
Jul
In medicinal chemistry, one often must compromise between absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties and affinity to a certain biological target. This is often a great challenge due to the limited chemical combinations which can yield a high affinity molecule for a target… but what if you had a protein with a very wide […]
When starting a new pharmaceutical chemistry project, there are several common approaches. In my opinion, the most interesting is to take a natural product with known therapeutic properties and begin modifying its structure. This strategy has yielded life saving, world changing medicines including the penicillin based family of antibiotics. Another strategy is to simply perform […]
The future of drug discovery Mankind will always be seeking to create molecular medicines which can solve the health issues we face. Chemical technology is the primary force which can make mankind more healthy, productive, and content as we proceed past our biological prime. Discovering drugs which can do this is thus one of the […]
- 1
- 2