To develop first-of-their-kind medicines for diseases for which there are no treatments, drug hunters typically have to create new drugs from scratch. It’s a laborious process that involves building and testing thousands of experimental compounds en route to finding even one that’s effective and safe enough to be tried in humans.

In these early stages of drug discovery, chemists have to design and synthesize molecules with specific properties in mind. They need to work well against a desired biological target (usually a key protein suspected of contributing to the disease), and also possess other attributes like being soluble and tolerated well in the human body.

In this seminar the main principles of drug design will be explained and some examples of recently developed drugs will be discussed, presenting the drug development process from the computational design to the chemical synthesis to the preclinical and clinical experimentation.