Department of Medicinal Chemistry

DirectoryFaculty, Staff, and Graduate Student Directory Research Facilities, Instrumentation, and Resources Graduate Program Description of Graduate Degree program in Medicinal Chemistry, Links to Graduate School, Departmental Degree Requirements, Information for prospective graduate students, Application information. LADDS Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Sponsored Laboratory for Applied Drug Design and Synthesis (LADDS). IGERT NSF Sponsored Intergrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, Entrepreneurial Medicinal and Polymer Science Initiative. Seminar Spring 2008 Department Seminar Series in Medicinal Chemistry. Announcements Press Release & Departmental Information.AAPS DDD MedChem Links JSHS 37th Annual 2008 Mississippi Junior Science and Humanities Symposium.

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The Laboratory for Applied Drug Design and Synthesis (LADDS)

The Department of Medicinal Chemistry, through a multi-year grant from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has created and implemented The Laboratory for Applied Drug Design and Synthesis (LADDS). LADDS consists of a multi-million dollar array of state-of-the-art instrumentation that provides the infrastructure required to support the mission of LADDS.

"The mission of LADDS is to achieve in parallel the multiple goals of teaching rational drug design and synthesis while carrying out the actual research endeavour of identifying novel antiinfective agents."

The focus of LADDS initially involved the chemotherapy of drug-resistant malaria. Other infectious organisms, particularly those with emerging resistance to conventional drug therapies, are now targeted in parallel projects. The core of LADDS instrumentation is the contrasting fields of computer aided-drug design (CADD), and combinatorial and/or parallel chemistry (CPC). The rational area of CADD is integrated with the more random seeming library synthesis by first constructing rational drug templates whose ultimate pharmaceutical properties are optimized by parallel synthesis of analogs. In collaboration with academic or industrial partners, biochemical or biological assays of these libraries then provides the necessary information for iterative rounds of design and synthesis until a unique agent with desirable properties can be identified. Finally, LADDS faculty are committed to the ultimate commercialization of the best of these new drugs and work with the Office of Research to ensure that intellectual property is generated before publications are obtained.

Core instrumentation has been acquired to streamline medicinal chemistry projects in a contemporary fashion, allowing for the preparation of libraries of compounds, ranging from tens to thousands of compounds, in a short time frame. Graduate students in our program receive extensive training using state-of-the-art instrumentation, and learn how to integrate the aspects of design, construction, analysis, purification, and data management of chemical libraries.