Robert (Bob) Gotwals

Medicinal Chemistry is the study of how new drugs are developed and tested. Students will learn the basic concepts and methods used by medicinal chemists. In the process of doing so, basic and advanced concepts in chemistry, biology, mathematics, and computing will be learned and applied to one or more medicinal chemistry problems. As such, this is an applied course: students will be expected to apply their knowledge of the basic sciences to medicinal chemistry challenges of increasing difficulty. This course makes significant use of computer modeling (computational chemistry). NCSSM is one of the only high schools in the country that teaches a formal course in medicinal chemistry.

Course Goals:

• Explore the basics of pharmacology, protein biology, drug design and development, and the role of genetics in modern pharmacology
• Understand the interaction of chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing that leads to the creation of new pharmaceuticals that will prevent or stop one or more disease conditions

Major topics:

• Chemistry fundamentals for medicinal chemistry
• Drugs and drug action
• Drug structure and solubility
• Quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR)
• Computational chemistry for drug design
• Pharmacokinetics
• Pharmacogenomics
• Case Study work

Prerequisites:

Students should have at least one semester of chemistry, preferably at the honors/AP level. Students should also have reasonable mathematics background, preferably at the algebra level or higher. Ability to work in a computing environment is not only a requirement for success in any distance learning program, but it is also important in doing computational chemistry. You will spend a considerable number of hours interacting with the computer in this course!

Expectations:

Students will study one major topic approximately every two weeks. Every topic consists of one or more lectures (conducted either over videoconferencing and/or through podcasts); reading of one or more chapters from Gareth Thomas' Medicinal Chemistry; a small structured computational lab that students do individually or in a small group; a larger lab that is done individually or collaboratively outside of class. There is a short 15-20 minute quiz each week covering information learned during the previous week. On average, students are expected to devote 8-10 hours a week, including both "in class" and out of class activities. In addition to weekly labs, readings, and quizzes, students will work on a small team to solve a medicinal chemistry "case study."

Course Delivery:

Students will interact with the instructor and fellow students using a wide variety of technologies, including email, videoconferencing, chat rooms, podcasts, shared collaboration tools (such as Google Docs), and other resources. All students will have accounts on the North Carolina High School Computational Chemistry server, a computing platform for doing chemistry housed at and maintained by the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. There are no physical (wet) labs conducted in this course.

Students will be involved in on-campus sessions, where they will spend considerable time interacting with the computational chemistry server, improving their ability to set up computational "jobs" and learning how to deal with the technical challenges of doing computational calculations.