Faculty of Science

Objectives

To present the different Biotechnological strategies employed in the design of modern drugs and vaccines.

Contents

Introduction to chemotherapy; Overview of Drug Discovery and Development; Target product profile (TPP); Notion of selective toxicity; Drug targets; Target discovery and validation; Relationship between protein structure and function; Molecular modeling and In silico docking in drug designs; Making use of databases of sequence and structure; Small molecule databases; Combinatorial chemistry; Screening Assays, assay validation; Preclinical studies; Clinical trials; Intellectual property issues; Commercialisation; Drug repurposing and Not-for-Profit Drug Development.

Vaccines: The immune system; Memory cells; Effector mechanisms; Immunoglobulin and T-cell based vaccines; Attenuated whole vaccines; Strategies for discovery and design of subunit vaccines; Sero-epidemiological approaches for identification of candidates; Peptide vaccines; Genetic immunization – Vector vaccines, DNA vaccines; Clinical trials and costs.