Organic Chemistry Applied to Biology

This course aims to provide the student with the foundation of organic synthesis/medchem and analytical chemistry/NMR, i.e. what is useful for the rational design, synthesis and characterization of small molecules endowed with biological activity, i.e. what is particularly relevant for the pharmaceutical sector.
The course will draw the student's attention to multi-disciplinary, chemistry-driven approaches to achieve a common goal - for this, the disciplines and techniques described in the course are often dealt with through different perspectives (for example, the use of NMR spectroscopy in the generation of target models and the structural optimization of small molecules, both considered both in terms of medchem and NMR technologies).
As to organic synthesis/medchem-related topics, the course aims to provide the students with basic knowledge of pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry and of its role in drug discovery, explaining how an organic chemist designs and selects molecules and reactions useful to support the identification and validation of molecular targets, to prepare drug-like collections of compounds for biological screening, and to structurally optimize biologically active compounds. The disciplines which can provide the medicinal chemist with elements for rational design and structural optimization of hits and leads of pharmaceutical value (i.e., computational chemistry, structural/biophysical sciences, etc.) are also presented in detail. Each of these topics is illustrated through the presentation and discussion of examples related to their application to modern successful pharmaceutical research / drug discovery projects.
As to analyticals/NMR, the course aims to provide the basic knowledge of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The concepts necessary to make the student able to read mono and bidimensional NMR spectra of simple molecules will be introduced. The various NMR techniques recently developed for the study of biomolecules and in particular the information that the student will be able to obtain from the various spectroscopic techniques will therefore be presented in detail. Then the NMR techniques that can be used to study the interaction between a ligand molecule and the target macromolecule will be presented. These techniques can be based on the observation of ligand or receptor signals. Each topic will be illustrated through the presentation and discussion of examples.

At the end of the course, the student will know how organic chemistry, and in particular drug-like chemical diversity (assembled collections of different small organic molecules), can help in the identification and the characterization of new molecular targets; and will have acquired the necessary rudiments to understand the process of rational / computational design of small molecule modulators of either structurally characterized molecular targets (structure-based drug design, SBDD; fragment-based drug design, FBDD), or of non-structurally characterized molecular targets through their known ligands (ligand-based drug design, LBDD). Moreover, the student will acquire, besides the basic knowledge of NMR spectroscopy, also skills on different interaction techniques and learn how nuclear magnetic resonance can be important for the study of ligand-receptor interactions and for the development of new biologically active molecules.