Medicinal Chemistry comprises two groups, Medicinal Chemistry 1 and Medicinal Chemistry 2, working together to develop modern chemistry skillsets and apply them to efficient drug discovery.

Priority in chemistry is given to good experimental design and the primary drivers are quality and impact. Compound design is knowledge driven and incorporates target based criteria (potency, selectivity) and compound based criteria (ADMET, Lipinski, Veber, etc.).
Medicinal Chemistry is also involved in the Target Selection phase, particularly in knowledge-based approaches to Target Selection, and chemistry input into Target Validation strategies.

Medicinal Chemistry 1
The primary role of Medicinal Chemistry 1 is to provide support in the Hit to Lead phase and to drive the development of thorough techniques for biological data analysis, molecule/array design and parallel chemistry, with an aim to build knowledge as well as progressing projects. In the Hit Validation phase analogue synthesis is varied out on novel hits and potential back-up series. With the aim to building

•  Confirm activity/potency at the intended target; specificity of action; and key selectivities
•  Establish tractability of potential series
•  Identify gaps or deficiencies between Hit profile and Lead Selection profile

Additional support is given to the Hit Identification process and to the Lead to Candidate phase to maintain flexibility. Awareness and interaction with all phases of the drug discovery process are vital to ensure efficient know-how transfer.

Medicinal Chemistry 1 is additionally responsible for analytical and preparative LCMS through the management of mass and UV-triggered LCMS instruments and for the 'Automation Lab' specifically constructed for the Zinsser and Beckman liquid handling systems used for array chemistry, parallel purification and compound re-formatting.

Medicinal Chemistry 2
The primary role of Medicinal Chemistry 2 is to drive the progression of projects in the Lead Optimisation phase using state-of-the-art medicinal chemistry approaches, and to play a central role in the utilisation of chemistry in the activities with other areas, such as in the knowledge-based Target Selection process, and chemistry input into Target Validation.

In a matrix environment, Medicinal Chemistry 2 is responsible for:
• Providing medicinal chemistry, NMR and project management skills to the projects;
• Compound collection building chemistry (both Medicinal Chemistry 1 and 2) runs alongside project chemistry, where in collaboration with Drug Design & Information Technologies, in house and contract chemistry is used to design and synthesize arrays around templates from disease targets of potential interest. The strategic target for a compound collection to support screening campaigns, comprising of mixed focussed sets and drug-like diversity sets, is to construct a high quality collection of proprietary compounds. These compounds would be broken down into gene-family focussed sets and drug-like sets with no specific gene-family bias.   The intention is to increase the probability of finding tractable hits by screening an enhanced compound collection.