Medicinal Chemistry Residential School 2014, China

The objective of the residential school is to strengthen excellence in medicinal chemistry by highlighting best practice and facilitating understanding of the factors governing modern drug discovery. Its purpose is to develop medicinal chemistry skills of chemists internationally, in particular those based in Asia. The residential school provides an outstanding programme of lectures, case studies, hands-on tutorial sessions to cover aspects of drug discovery. Delegates have the opportunity to ask questions after each talk but also during the tutorial sessions. Delegates will be exposed to new areas of research as well as learning from numerous case studies highlighting how the process comes together to overcome the challenges of bringing a drug to market.

The Medicinal Chemistry Residential School forms part of the Royal Society of Chemistry's on-going programme of activities relating to human health and supporting skills development for drug discovery.
Throughout the 3 day course, there are a series of lectures, case histories and tutorials. Delegates split into small tutorial groups to maximise learning opportunities and networking amongst speakers and delegates. The tutorials allow attendees to put into practice what they learn via hands-on examples and discussions with the tutors. Speakers and tutors are available for informal discussions and interactions throughout the course.

Themes
The residential school covered the following topics:

Drug discovery process
Common drug targets/receptor
Target identification and validation
Structure-guided drug design
Pharmacokinetics & drug metabolism
Computational chemistry
Quantitative structure-activity relationship
Small molecules & lead development
Lead optimisation strategies
Toxicology in drug discovery
Drug discovery case histories