Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline of chemistry that studies the structure, properties and reactions of organic compounds, which contain carbon in covalent bonding. Study of structure determines their chemical composition and formula. Study of properties includes physical and chemical properties, and evaluation of chemical reactivity to understand their behavior. The study of organic reactions includes the chemical synthesis of natural products, drugs, and polymers, and study of individual organic molecules in the laboratory and via theoretical study.
Hydrolase is a class of enzyme that commonly perform as biochemical catalysts that use water to break a chemical bond, which typically results in dividing a larger molecule to smaller molecules. Some common examples of hydrolase enzymes are esterases including lipases, phosphatases, glycosidases, peptidases, and nucleosidases.
In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered.
Cheminformatics is the use of computer and informational techniques applied to a range of problems in the field of chemistry. These in silico techniques are used, for example, in pharmaceutical companies and academic settings in the process of drug discovery. These methods can also be used in chemical and allied industries in various other forms.
Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is most commonly an organic small molecule that activates or inhibits the function of a biomolecule such as a protein, which in turn results in a therapeutic benefit to the patient. In the most basic sense, drug design involves the design of molecules that are complementary in shape and charge to the biomolecular target with which they interact and therefore will bind to it. Drug design frequently but not necessarily relies on computer modeling techniques. This type of modeling is sometimes referred to as computer-aided drug design. Finally, drug design that relies on the knowledge of the three-dimensional structure of the biomolecular target is known as structure-based drug design. In addition to small molecules, biopharmaceuticals including peptides and especially therapeutic antibodies are an increasingly important class of drugs and computational methods for improving the affinity, selectivity, and stability of these protein-based therapeutics have also been developed.
Medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry are disciplines 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).
A pharmacophore is an abstract description of molecular features that are necessary for molecular recognition of a ligand by a biological macromolecule. IUPAC defines a pharmacophore to be "an ensemble of steric and electronic features that is necessary to ensure the optimal supramolecular interactions with a specific biological target and to trigger its biological response". A pharmacophore model explains how structurally diverse ligands can bind to a common receptor site. Furthermore, pharmacophore models can be used to identify through de novo design or virtual screening novel ligands that will bind to the same receptor.
A biological target is anything within a living organism to which some other entity is directed and/or binds, resulting in a change in its behavior or function. Examples of common classes of biological targets are proteins and nucleic acids. The definition is context-dependent, and can refer to the biological target of a pharmacologically active drug compound, the receptor target of a hormone, or some other target of an external stimulus. Biological targets are most commonly proteins such as enzymes, ion channels, and receptors.
Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, also known as ChEBI, is a database and ontology of molecular entities focused on 'small' chemical compounds, that is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies effort. The term "molecular entity" refers to any "constitutionally or isotopically distinct atom, molecule, ion, ion pair, radical, radical ion, complex, conformer, etc., identifiable as a separately distinguishable entity". The molecular entities in question are either products of nature or synthetic products which have potential bioactivity. Molecules directly encoded by the genome, such as nucleic acids, proteins and peptides derived from proteins by proteolytic cleavage, are not as a rule included in ChEBI.
Stuart L. Schreiber is a scientist at Harvard University and co-Founder of the Broad Institute. He has been active in chemical biology, especially the use of small molecules as probes of biology and medicine. Small molecules are the molecules of life most associated with dynamic information flow; these work in concert with the macromolecules that are the basis for inherited information flow.
Cambrex Corporation is a life sciences company that provides products and services for small molecule active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).
Drug discovery depends on methods by which many different chemicals are assayed for their activity. These chemicals are stored as physical quantities in a chemical library or libraries which are often assembled from both outside vendors and internal chemical synthesis efforts. These chemical libraries are used in high-throughput screening in the drug discovery hit to lead process.
ChemAxon is a cheminformatics and bioinformatics software development company specializing in cloud based, end user solutions, back end platforms and consultancy services for chemical and biological research. Headquartered in Budapest, Hungary with 121 employees. The company also operates business and consultancy offices globally in Cambridge, MA, San Diego, CA, and in Prague. ChemAxon supports its customers via exclusive distributors in China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Australia. ChemAxon provides solutions, platforms, applications, and consultancy services for handling chemical and biological entities for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, new materials, fine-, petro- and agrochemical, food and cosmetics industries. ChemAxon supports academic institutions through special software licensing programs for students, teachers, academic researchers, and high school curriculums. Tools and software solutions are offered to academic research groups wishing to integrate cheminformatic functionalities into open website platforms via web hosting services.
Lonza Group is a Swiss multinational, chemicals and biotechnology company, headquartered in Basel, with major facilities in Europe, North America and South Asia. Lonza was established under that name in the late 19th-century in Switzerland. The company provides product development services to the pharmaceutical and biologic industries, including organic, fine and performance chemicals, custom manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals, chemical synthesis capabilities, detection systems and services for the bioscience sector.
Peter B. Dervan is the Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. The primary focus of his research is the development and study of small organic molecules that can sequence-specifically recognize DNA, a field in which he is an internationally recognized authority. The most important of these small molecules are pyrrole–imidazole polyamides. Dervan is credited with influencing "the course of research in organic chemistry through his studies at the interface of chemistry and biology" as a result of his work on "the chemical principles involved in sequence-specific recognition of double helical DNA". He is the recipient of many awards, including the National Medal of Science (2006).
John E. McMurry, born July 27, 1942, in New York City, is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. He received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1964 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1967 working with Gilbert Stork. Following completion of his Ph.D., he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1967 and moved to Cornell University in 1980.
(William) Graham Richards is a chemist and Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. He served as head of the department of chemistry at the University of Oxford from 1997 to 2006.
Anacor Pharmaceuticals is a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing and commercializing novel small-molecule therapeutics derived from its boron chemistry platform. It is based in Palo Alto, California, United States. Anacor was founded in 2002 based on technology created by Lucy Shapiro at Stanford University and Stephen Benkovic at Pennsylvania State University. Cofounder David Perry served as CEO and President from 2002 to 2014, and took the company public in 2010. Since then, the company has generated a pipeline of both topical and systemic boron-based compounds of which five are currently in clinical development.
Elizabeth Marie Nolan is an American chemist and Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
