Welcome to the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Structural Biology

Recent advances in biomedical and chemical research areas such as genomics, structural biology, and high-throughput synthetic chemistry offer many exciting new opportunities for the design and development of drug-like small molecules for a variety of purposes. In the DivMCSB, we embrace these opportunities and apply our synthetic and computational chemistry expertise, as well as structural and functional biology capabilities in order to provide sophisticated pharmacological probes to unravel physiological processes relevant to both health and disease, and to discover and develop drug candidate molecules for the treatment of diseases that continue to cause much human suffering.

We are also interested in how macromolecules such as proteins and oligonucleotides recognise not only each other, but also how they interact with drug ligands, because such fundamental understanding underpins the efficient design of molecularly targeted agents. We adopt an integrated approach, in which multi-disciplinary research is carried out interactively both within the DivMCBS and beyond.

Although we are engaged in drug discovery and development activities across a range of therapeutic areas, it is cancer research that plays a particularly important role in the activities of the DivMCSB, which is closely associated with the Cancer Research at Nottingham Centre (CRN).

The ten academic members of the DivMCSB lead a research group of over 50 postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and our research activities fall within the areas of Medicinal Chemistry, Chemical Biology, Structural Biology and Computational Modelling and Infomatics all of which are supported with the latest infrastructure.