Pharmacology is a branch of medicine, biology and pharmaceutical sciences concerned with drug or medication action, where a drug may be defined as any artificial, natural, or endogenous molecule which exerts a biochemical or physiological effect on the cell, tissue, organ, or organism. More specifically, it is the study of the interactions that occur between a living organism and chemicals that affect normal or abnormal biochemical function. If substances have medicinal properties, they are considered pharmaceuticals.
Medicinal chemistry is discipline at the intersection of chemistry, especially synthetic organic chemistry, and pharmacology and various other biological specialties, where they are involved with design, chemical synthesis and development for market of pharmaceutical agents, or bio-active molecules (drugs).
Merck refers primarily to the German Merck family and three companies founded by the family, including:
Frank Henry Westheimer was an American chemist. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1936 to 1954, and at Harvard University from 1953 to 1983, becoming the Morris Loeb Professor of Chemistry in 1960, and Professor Emeritus in 1983. The Westheimer medal was established in his honor in 2002.
Christopher Abell was a British biological chemist. He was Professor of Biological Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge and Todd-Hamied Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. On his 2016 election to the Royal Society, the society described his research as having "changed the face of drug discovery."
Biological engineering or bioengineering is the application of principles of biology and the tools of engineering to create usable, tangible, economically-viable products. Biological engineering employs knowledge and expertise from a number of pure and applied sciences, such as mass and heat transfer, kinetics, biocatalysts, biomechanics, bioinformatics, separation and purification processes, bioreactor design, surface science, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and polymer science. It is used in the design of medical devices, diagnostic equipment, biocompatible materials, renewable energy, ecological engineering, agricultural engineering, process engineering and catalysis, and other areas that improve the living standards of societies.
Ronald T. Raines is an American chemical biologist. He is the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for using ideas and methods of physical organic chemistry to solve important problems in biology.
The history of biochemistry can be said to have started with the ancient Greeks who were interested in the composition and processes of life, although biochemistry as a specific scientific discipline has its beginning around the early 19th century. Some argued that the beginning of biochemistry may have been the discovery of the first enzyme, diastase, in 1833 by Anselme Payen, while others considered Eduard Buchner's first demonstration of a complex biochemical process alcoholic fermentation in cell-free extracts to be the birth of biochemistry. Some might also point to the influential work of Justus von Liebig from 1842, Animal chemistry, or, Organic chemistry in its applications to physiology and pathology, which presented a chemical theory of metabolism, or even earlier to the 18th century studies on fermentation and respiration by Antoine Lavoisier.
Christopher David Garner FRSC FRS is a retired British chemist, whose research work was in the growing field of Biological Inorganic Chemistry. His research primarily focussed on the role of transition metal elements in biological processes, for which he published over 400 original papers and reviews on the topic. His specific interests lie in the roles of Molybdenum and Tungsten as the metal centres in various enzyme cofactors based on the molybdopterin molecule.
Richard Bruce Silverman is the Patrick G. Ryan/Aon Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. His group's main focus is basic and translational research into central nervous system disorders and cancer. He is the author of more than 385 research publications, 128 issued patents, and several books, including The organic chemistry of drug design and drug action, now in its third edition; the third edition was co-written with Mark W. Holladay. He is well known for the discovery of pregabalin, which is marketed by Pfizer under the trade name Lyrica.
William Platt Jencks was an American biochemist. He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes, using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms.
JoAnne Stubbe is an American chemist best known for her work on ribonucleotide reductases, for which she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2009. In 2017, she retired as a Professor of Chemistry and Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jeremy Keith Morris Sanders is a British chemist and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Royal Society Open Science. He is known for his contributions to many fields including NMR spectroscopy and supramolecular chemistry. He served as the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional Affairs at the University of Cambridge, 2011–2015.
Neil L. Kelleher is the Walter and Mary Elizabeth Glass Professor of Chemistry, Molecular Biosciences, and Medicine at Northwestern University. His research focuses on mass spectrometry, primarily its application to proteomics. He is known mainly for top-down proteomics and the development of the fragmentation technique of electron-capture dissociation with Roman Zubarev while in Fred McLafferty's lab at Cornell University.
The Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, formerly known as the Paul-Lewis Award in Enzyme Chemistry was established in 1945. Consisting of a gold medal and honorarium, its purpose is to stimulate fundamental research in enzyme chemistry by scientists not over forty years of age. The award is administered by the Division of Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.
Nigel Shaun Scrutton is a British biochemist and biotechnology innovator known for his work on enzyme catalysis, biophysics and synthetic biology. He is Director of the UK Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, Director of the Fine and Speciality Chemicals Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SYNBIOCHEM), and Co-founder, Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the 'fuels-from-biology' company C3 Biotechnologies Ltd. He is Professor of Enzymology and Biophysical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. He is former Director of the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB).
Emily P. Balskus is an American chemical biologist, enzymologist, microbiologist, and biochemist born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1980. She has been on the faculty of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology department of Harvard University since 2011 and is currently the Morris Kahn Associate Professor. She has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers and three book chapters. Since 2012 she has been invited to give over 170 lectures, has held positions on various editorial boards, and served as a reviewer for ACS and Nature journals among others. Balskus also currently serves as a consultant for Novartis, Kintai Therapeutics, and Merck & Co.
Sarah E. O'Connor is an American molecular biologist working to understand the molecular machinery involved in assembling important plant natural products - vinblastine, morphine, iridoids, secologanin - and how changing the enzymes involved in this pathway lead to diverse analogs. She was a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in the UK between 2011 and 2018. O'Connor was appointed by the Max Planck Society in 2018 to head the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, taking up her role during 2019.
Ruma Banerjee is a professor of enzymology and biological chemistry at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is an experimentalist whose research has focused on unusual cofactors in enzymology.
Pfizer Award is an annual award for the best book on the history of science, awarded by the History of Science Society
