Medicinal chemistry is a dynamic, multifaceted scientific discipline dedicated to the improvement of human health through research leading to new concepts for the design and development of therapeutic and diagnostic agents. At UNC-Chapel Hill, medicinal chemistry is a unique basic science that seamlessly blends the principles and experimental techniques of chemistry and biology with computational science aiding the discovery process. The focus of medicinal chemistry is on biology, which distinguishes it from traditional chemistry, and it uses chemical tools, which distinguishes it from traditional biology. The field also has deep connections with medicine and molecular pharmacology.

While maintaining a traditional emphasis on the small molecule (drug candidate), the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products has integrated the contemporary biological methods to merge small molecule and target biomolecule research to allow for elucidation of disease pathways and mechanisms of drug action. Thus, our program encompasses drug discovery, target discovery and validation, and the use of computational sciences to help describe and predict drug function. This information serves as the basis for the development of new therapeutic agents. Current innovations are targeting the spread of cancer with enzymes, exploring the roots behind natural remedies to find new therapeutic agents, and studying proteins at the molecular level.

The division has research strengths in:

• Synthesis and structure-activity characterization of pharmaceutically relevant small molecules and natural products
• Bioorganic and chemical biology studies of the properties of designed small-molecule ligands and their cognate drug targets, including proteins, nucleic acids, and glycoconjugates
• Combinatorial biochemistry and proteomics for the identification of novel signaling pathways and drug targets
• Structural biology and biomolecular dynamics of drug-protein interactions
• Chemo- and bioinformatics
• Molecular modeling