The lectures will cover a range of aspects of drug development and discovery and give recent examples from the pharmaceutical industry by external lecturers. Topics that will be discussed include:
- pharmacology about administration, absorption, distribution and elimination of a drug as well as phamacodynamics and pharmacokinetics
- the methods for target identification and validation, including bioinformatics/genomics
- the different types of therapeutic drugs and their properties: proteins including antibodies and derivate, polymer molecules, small molecules, peptides, viral vectors and cells
- the methods for the development of the therapeutic drugs such as screening approaches, computational approaches, in silico drug design and ADMET prediction
- the safety and efficacy requirements in pre-clinical studies and clinical trials
- the methods for the assessments of the drug properties and safety
- market landscape for the different types of drugs and their therapeutic areas
- entrepreneurship and development of young research companies in medical drug domain
- intellectual property protection in the context of biotechnology and drug development
- methods for commercial production of active substances
- methods for drug delivery including nanoparticles
Each student will perform an assignment covering a majority of the taught material in form of a report, peer reviewing, oral presentation and opposition (group work with individual reporting).