Pharmaceutical Molecular Design
Hiroshi Kogen, Ph.D., Professor
Katsumi Iida, Ph.D., Research Associate
Medicinal chemistry is at the forefront of innovation, blending synthetic chemistry, molecular modeling, computational biology, structural genomics, and pharmacology to discover and design new drugs, and investigate their interaction at the molecular, cellular, and whole-animal level. Structure-based drug design becomes one of the most powerful approaches to develop useful drugs in recent medicinal chemistry. In structure-based drug design, the three-dimensional structure of a drug target interacting with small molecules is used to guide drug discovery. Structure-based drug design represents the idea that you can see exactly how the molecule interacts with its target protein. Our mission is to create new knowledge for the discovery and development of new pharmaceutical drugs based on concept of structure-based drug design. Our studies include: 1) docking study of the designed compounds with target protein; 2) the design and development of new reactions, methods, reagents, and strategies that introduce fundamentally novel ways of synthesizing complex molecules (including natural products) of biological or medicinal significance.
