Medicinal Chemistry

The medicinal chemistry track is a complex scientific discipline whose focus is to develop molecules that can impact human health by discovering, designing, synthesizing and characterizing safe and effective agents for disease therapy and diagnosis. The research involves a multidisciplinary approach encompassing chemistry and biology, and includes organic synthesis, protein and nucleic acid chemistry, natural product chemistry, computational chemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, structural biology, pharmacology and proteomics.

  • You will learn to design, synthesize and characterize new medicinal agents and enhance the biological activity of existing pharmaceutical agents.
  • You will learn to use computational, biophysical, structural biology and cell-based screening technologies to identify natural and synthetic compounds for pharmacological activity and to conduct structure-based drug design.
  • You will isolate, characterize, and synthesize compounds based on natural products, as well as target identification for biologically active natural products.

Competency Grid and Curricular Map

Primary contact:
Xiang-Qin (Sean) Xie, PhD, MBA
Professor, Pharmaceutical Sciences
529 Salk Hall
Phone: 412-383-5276
xix15@pitt.edu