Medicinal chemistry

Medicinal chemistry is the application of chemistry to the identification, synthesis, and preparation of pharmaceutical and medicinal compounds. Medicinal compounds come from a variety of sources and ideally serve a single purpose in their application as pharmaceuticals. The basic science of pharmaceutical materials is organic chemistry, which is utilized in the analysis and identification of biologically active materials, the preparation of those materials and their derivatives, and the determination of their modes of function within biological systems. The research area, therefore, involves the identification, synthesis, and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes the study of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR).