Profilo personale: Silvio Aprile

The course delivers information on the drug discovery and development process providing the general principles of R&D. It will be divided in sub-courses:

(i) Pre-clinical and Clinical Pharmacology. The course will illustrate the drug discovery process from a pharmacological perspective and will provide students with notions of the main drug classes. The course will also provide students with the ability to read and critically analyse pre-clinical and clinical data.

(ii) Medicinal Chemistry. The course will provide the students with the basic principles for the discovery and optimization of a bioactive compound, from hit to lead, with a focus on drug metabolism. The design of prodrugs and softdrugs for topical use will be covered. Examples of successful stories of dermatological drugs will be presented.

(iii) In silico drug discovery and design. The course will illustrate the many ways we can describe, represent and visualize molecules in the computer, the importance of recognizing and understanding the concept of similarity and the physicochemical and topological descriptors. The students will learn the use of 3D Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSARs) approaches as an example to correlate molecular structures with their known biological endpoints. The In silico optimization of new molecular entities to enhance potency against the enzyme-binding site of interest will be illustrated.

(iv) Principles of drug formulation. The course will provide students with basic principles of formulation, illustrating how physical pharmacy principles are applied to the preparation of liquid and semi-solid dosage forms used for topical application of medications and cosmetics (creams, ointments, gels, colloids, patches and sunscreen formulations).

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