In preparing my first medicinal chemistry course at the University of Vienna I wanted to provide students with my personal perspective on what is important to learn and to ignore what is best ignored. 288 powerpoint slides and many twitter discussions later I had learnt a lot about a field of science that I thought I already knew a lot about. Sharing my take on medicinal chemistry with a broader audience, on the chance that this might help discovering more and better medicines in the future, is what drove me to start McConnell’s Medchem.
the important and the not so important
The field of medicinal chemistry has never been more exciting than today: the expansion into protein degradation, the drugging of “undruggables” such as KRAS-G12C, the technological advances in for example cryo-EM and alpha-Fold provide a flavour of the field today. The breadth of this highly interdisciplinary field and today’s blistering pace of new discoveries makes it not only a challenge to keep up but also difficult to distill the important from the not so impotent. This resource focusses solely on what I perceive as being the important which will clearly be at the cost of completeness.
a picture says a thousand words
My passion for graphically simplifying and distilling things will be prominent on the website. All graphics, illustrations and animations on the site (collected over time on this page) may be used under a creative commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC-BY-ND 4.0) licence. Please share, copy and redistribute the material for any purpose (including commercial) but give appropriate credit by referencing McConnell’s Medchem.
the content
McConnell’s Medchem aims to be for a broad audience interested in drug discovery. There will be a small molecule focus (whatever small is these days) but this will not be a limit as there is a lot to learn from all types of medicines big or small. There will be content for aspiring and the seasoned medicinal chemists alike. Also, making drug discovery understandable to the broader community, such as scientists outside of medicinal chemistry in partner disciplines and lay people interested in how drugs are discovered, is also an important aim, especially for the less technical articles.
My writing happens in waves of productive and less productive phases. During productive times new content is likely to come out weekly but I will strive to add a new posts at least once a month. Tuesday will be the day when things go on line. Please subscribe to the newsletter (it’s free) so that you are informed of new content.
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Posts will fall under a number of categories: Introductory, Big Picture, Key Concepts, MedChem Stories, MedChem Strategy, Technologies and Theory. Key primary literature references will be linked thoughout the site and a dictionary of terms will be built over time as a general reference.
interaction accelerates learning
Interaction accelerates learning (also for the teacher) so commenting is available for all posts. Please feel free to post any comments, questions, corrections or additions however large or small. I will engage in the exchange and adapt the content based discussion outcomes. Importantly, I will endeavour to appropriately acknowledge those people who have helped me shaped the content.
