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 lead to us discovering more and better medicines in the future, is what drove me to start McConnell’s Medchem.
the important and the impotent
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 just to provide a flavour. 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 impotent. This resource focusses solely on what I perceive as the important at the cost of completeness.
simplifying through graphics
My passion for graphically simplifying and distilling things will be prominent on the website. Graphics, illustrations and animations on the site (collected 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.
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. A clear focus of the content will be for aspiring and seasoned medicinal chemists themselves. However, 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.
During productive phases new content is likely to come out weekly but new posts will come out at least once a month. Tuesday will be the day when things go on line. Please subscribe (it’s free) to the newsletter to be informed of new content.
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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, an acknowledgments section will be included where possible in order to give those people who have shaped the content due recognition.
