Department of Medicinal Chemistrywas founded in December of 1996 by amalgamating the Teaching and Research section of Medicinal Chemistry with the Laboratory of Anti-tumor Drugs. It is the core of the discipline of medicinal chemistrywhich was evaluated as one of State Key Disciplines in 2001. and its main course, medicinal chemistry, is one of the National Elaborated Course in Peking University. The department has a teaching staff of sixteen,which includes 7 professors and 2 associate professors.Among them, there are 1 academician of Chinese Academy of Science, 2 Scholar of the Yangtze River, 1 Young scholars of the Yangtze River, 2 winners of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, 10 Ph.D. supervisors and 8 M.S. supervisors.Ph.D. and M.S. graduate student research programs are provided in the department.
The department has excellent facilities for research including a series of instruments for molecule design, chemical synthesis, purification and bioactivity analysis such as molecular modeling & computer-assisted drug design (CADD) workstation, automated microwave synthesizer, DNA synthesizer, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), surface plasmon resonance (SPR), and capillary electrophoresis (CE), etc, which provide a complete platform for drug discovery.
The mission of the department is to create new knowledge for discovery and development of novel drugs based on the structure of functional gene/protein which relate to cancer, viral infection or other major diseases. Some of our faculties are nationally and internationally recognized for their innovative scientific contributions in basic and applied research.
Our current researches focus on the following directions: 1) Discovery and validation of new anti-cancer or anti-viral drugs targeting nucleic acid; 2) Research of saccharide drugs;3) Discovery and structural optimization of drug lead compounds;4) Synthetic methodology research of bioactive substances; 5) Methodology research of drug design; etc.These researches are funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation, the Ministry of Education, and cooperative contracts with pharmaceutical companies.
