NU Ideas Season 3 | No.4
Events List
Thursday 30th January | 6pm
Expanding the scope of drug discovery: developing new chemical reactions to explore chemical space.
Dr Jonathan Knowles, Assistant Professor in Chemistry
Department of Applied Sciences
Synthetic organic chemistry. Broadly, the development of new kinds of chemical reaction for the synthesis of organic (i.e. carbon- and hydrogen-containing) molecules.
The development of new drugs is essential to meeting current societal challenges, including obesity and aging populations. Our ability to synthesise new types of molecules is key to this, with different shapes and sizes of molecule – broadly termed ‘chemical space’ – resulting in very different bioactivities of the associated compounds. While our understanding of what types of molecule are likely to constitute a potential drug candidate has improved in recent years, we remain reliant on costly high-throughput screening of compounds in order to bring new drugs to the market. This talk will introduce some of the challenges associated with the development of drug molecules and discuss how we can approach the development of new types of chemical reactions to meet these.
Chemistry without the chemicals: do we even need laboratories in in today’s chemistry research?
Dr Mark Sims, Assistant Professor in computational chemistry
Department of Applied Sciences
Computational chemistry, using computer simulations to understand the properties of chemical systems and developing methods to predict the properties of chemical systems before they are made in the laboratory.
In many industries, computer simulations are a prerequisite for product development. For example, in engineering structures will usually be subjected to numerous simulations before even the first prototype is made. However, the chemical industry has traditionally relied on an experimental trial-and-error approach, in which new chemicals are made and tested in a laboratory before further modifications are tried. Why is this? And how are computer simulations now helping experimental chemists target molecules that are likely to succeed in their application, or chemical reactions that are likely to work? This talk will discuss how computation is becoming ever more important to chemists and the chemical industry.
A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | FREE
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