PHAR 7125 Principles of Drug Design

This course provides basic understanding to principles of drug discovery, design and development. The topics covered include choosing a disease, identifying drug targets, establishing testing procedures, finding a lead compound, lead optimization, performing the preclinical and clinical trials, and introducing new drugs to the market. The course will have more emphasis on the methods used to design a lead compound, such as ligand/structure-based drug design methods. It will also explain the approaches used in improving the pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties of lead compounds. Recent advances in drug design such as the use of molecular modeling software tools will also be presented.