A friend of mine told me recently-you still have that fire from grad school. It is indeed true that 25 years after graduating with a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry, I still practice the truly multidisciplinary science of Medicinal chemistry. A general ‘mis’-understanding about Medicinal chemistry and a statement I have frequently encountered or told to me is–“one can learn medchem on the job, all you need is to be a great synthetic organic chemist”. It has been my experience, however, that to be a really good and creative medicinal chemist, you not only need to be a great synthetic organic chemist, but a lot more multidisciplinary than just that. A good PhD program in Medicinal Chemistry will equip you with these skills for drug discovery right out of school, rather than the 10+ years it may take to self-learn the science on the job. I will discuss my drug discovery journey as a Principal investigator and medicinal chemist, doing independently initiated drug discovery, of tools and potential therapeutics, at biological targets ranging from GPCRs, ion channels, nuclear receptors and enzymes. I will focus on how my background in medicinal chemistry allowed me to develop creative approaches to discover lead compounds, to explore hypotheses validating novel pharmacological targets, in therapeutic areas ranging from oncology to CNS therapeutics–starting in a nonprofit research organization to founding my own company, now in its eighth year of discovering medicines for unmet clinical needs.

Science of medicinal chemistry in the discovery of medicines: From ideas-to-trenches-to-the corner office-to-medicine cabinet

255th National Meeting (2018)

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