Graduates Pass on Medicinal Chemistry Baton

Talented chemistry graduates, industry and the scientific community are reaping the rewards of ‘radically’ different and unique University-Industry collaborations designed to train tomorrow’s medicinal chemists in research and industry practice.

Third year undergraduates and fourth year MSci Chemistry students in the School of Chemistry at The University of Nottingham are benefitting from two new modules sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline to help train ‘research and industry ready’ graduates. In turn the final year students have discovered a new series of compounds that could provide a starting point for future optimisation work leading to a treatment for a chronic respiratory illness.

Originally conceived in 2010 as a module for 3^rd year undergraduates that was taught by Dr Jonathan Fray, in 2011 the collaboration was extended to a Drug Discovery research project for final year students. Over the last five years, 50 students have participated in ongoing research to discover a new treatment for Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) — a life threatening lung disease which is currently poorly treated. Preliminary results have already been published in leading academic journals including Drug Discovery Today describing this innovative partnership as a ‘radically different industry-academia collaboration.’

The research is co-led by Dr Simon Macdonald a Director of Medicinal Chemistry in the Fibrosis and Lung Injury Discovery Performance Unit at GSK and a visiting professor at The University of Nottingham. It is carried out in partnership with Mr Thomas McInally a Business Science Fellow at The University of Nottingham and Dr Andrew Nortcliffe a GSK Teaching Fellow.  Each year a group of 10 final-year undergraduates are taught how to analyse and use the Structure Activity Relationships generated in the project to design novel compounds. Synthetic chemistry is subsequently carried out over two 10-week terms and biological and physicochemical screening data of the new compounds is generated by GSK.

This initiative has inspired the next generation of UK scientists with a unique insight into the multi-disciplinary process carried out in projects in the Pharmaceutical industry to discovery of new drugs and will equip them with the scientific and team working skills required for their future careers.