Pharmaceutical chemistry is a field which utilizes the basics of chemistry and biology, thereby producing knowledge in which pharmaceutical materials are produced. Therefore, a “pharmaceutical chemist” has to be not only a skillful organic chemist, but also should have knowledge about basic sciences in bio-sciences, especially biochemistry, pharmacology, and pharmaco-kinetics. 

Considering the above, the basic branch in pharmaceutical chemistry involves drug discovery within which mastery in sciences such as organic chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, and bio-pharmacy becomes a must. Among the other important branches of the field one may note to the drug synthesis, designing new molecules, molecular modifications in order to better the drug impacts (power, specificity, physic-chemical characteristics modifications, and betterment of pharmaco-kinetics characteristics). 

Utilization of the molecular modeling is very helpful in this field, which put the field into “Computational medicinal Chemistry” in which the pharmaceutical chemist can work in. The latter field is also integrated with the science of drug design. 

On the other hand, one of the branches of the field of pharmaceutical chemistry is the analysis of drug and chemical materials which may become important by the utilization of NMR, Mass, IR, and UV chemical structure determining machinery, and they become helpful in the appearance of new compounds with natural origin. 

 Moreover, a “pharmaceutical chemist” utilizes the quantitative analytical methods, such as chromatography, and its advanced machinery including LC-MS, GC-MS, and CE, as well as other quantitative machines such as polarography, AA, polarimetry, which can be useful in quantitative control of the drug materials and determining the amount of chemical and medicinal materials in various chemical and biological matrixes. Indeed, the important branch of analysis in pharmaceutical chemistry provides close and integrated relationship with industry useful in qualitative and quantitative control of drugs. The provision of new analytical methods in order to determine drug amount in order to conduct pharma-kinetics, doping, qualitative, and quantitative researches on the drugs, and the stability studies include the other potentials of pharmaceutical chemistry. 

The Department Contact Info: 

E-Mail: z.hajimahdi@sbmu.ac.ir