Medicinal Chemistry

Medicinal chemistry is a sub-discipline of organic and inorganic chemistry which has taken a true part at the end of the 19th century when Paul Ehrlich discovered the first synthetic drugs, essential to cure public health disorders and infectious diseases, e.g. methylene blue. The medchem was born with a huge quantity of new drugs launched on the market by industry. Then, after 50 years of success, the medicinal chemistry has started to decline, as a field considered by many as an unwelcome territory. This is due to the fact that many biologists, many chemists wanted to model and to predict too quickly the unpredictable or too complex systems.

From the 1980', the more extravagant promises of combinatorial chemistry and high throughput screenings and related technologies ended up in the same bin "as the more extravagant promises of (virtual screening and) modeling, stored in the basement alongside some dusty but snazzy-looking hardware for which no one now can locate the manuals." (Nowhere To Go But Up: The Return of Medicinal Chemistry Derek B. Lowe*, ACS Med. Chem. Lett. 2012, 3, 3−4)

However, in recent years, the industry has finally found a truly effective way to ditch its expensive chemists: lay them off. Medicinal chemists have to recover their own ways of thinking.

As a medicinal chemist trained at the interface of chemistry and biology, I would conclude as: let make the drugs in cerebro, instead of in silico, by taking into account the global understanding of the complex systems in a semi-empiric way, and semi-rational way of thinking !