Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
Vision
In education, the Pharmaceutical chemistry department aims to develop highly competent, professional, skillful, pharmacist with a wide scientific background that contributes to the community development through communication and team-working abilities; both locally and internationally.
In research field, it is our aim to perform high-rated scientific researches, competing with international publications and to develop high-quality, professional, challenging, enthusiastic and innovative researchers with good thinking, problem-solving, team-working abilities.
Mission
Pharmaceutical chemistry is a unique blend of physical and biological sciences. So, our mission is to give the students a wide and diverse scientific background, and a rewarding and challenging program of study.
Areas of active interest include drug design and discovery, organic synthesis of medicinal and pharmaceutical agents, chemistry of natural and synthetic products, structure-activity relationship, peptide chemistry, molecular modeling, drug metabolism and molecular toxicology and many other related topics.
Concerning the research activities:
The Pharmaceutical chemistry department has two fields of research; the first includes the design and synthesis of new potential drug molecules belonging, chemically, to a wide variety of carbocyclic and heterocyclic skeleta, and biologically, to a wide variety of pharmacological classes. The second field of research interest is the design and development of new methods of quantitative analysis of existing drugs in pure form or in dosage form.
Teaching and research activities are supported and maintained by highly qualified staff members and laboratory facilities.
Activities and Role of the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Department:
The Pharmaceutical Chemistry department is concerned with teaching the undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of medicinal chemistry, drug design, drug synthesis and drug analysis.
a) Undergraduate students:
The scope of interest of the department toward undergraduate students is to implement a good knowledge and understanding of the chemical structure of the different classes of therapeutic drugs as a preliminary step to correlate between structure and activity of the drugs. This is in addition to a proper understanding of the action of the drugs at the cellular and biomolecular levels. This structure-activity relationship, together with an advanced study of drug design (principles and strategies), would enable the student to figure out how new drugs are developed. Moreover, the student is made familiar with the modern techniques of drug analysis, as an important tool to assure the quality of drugs both in their pure form and dosage forms.
b) Postgraduate students and research activities:
As for the postgraduate students, premaster courses are given that emphasize on the two main research fields offered by the department (drug synthesis and drug analysis). Topics given are concerned with the recent trends in drug design and development, the modern routes and techniques in drug synthesis, advanced techniques in drug analysis, together with other related topics. The staff members of the department supervise as much as 28 Master and PhD theses per year with students from several governmental and private universities, and from many research centers.
Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University as one of the leading scientific pharmaceutical associations in Egypt is always trying to face challenges in Pharma industry. Drug discovery diploma is the first in Egypt that provide courses to master different aspects in the process of drug discovery, design and development.
c) Contributions to the community:
The study given by the Pharmaceutical Chemistry department to both undergraduate and postgraduate students is a part of a programme that offer to the community professional pharmacists and talented innovative researchers that may help in the discovery and development of new drugs that will enrich the pharmaceutical industry in Egypt.