Training our future clinical pharmacologists

Every year, a scientist from the Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre presents a series of lectures on medicinal chemistry to the students enrolled in the Clinical Pharmacology Honours programme, which is administered by the Department of Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences.

The lectures aim to provide the students with an overview of the drug discovery pipeline and, in particular, the contributions of the medicinal chemist. The discovery by H3D scientists of MMV390048, the first clinical candidate for malaria to be developed by African scientists on African soil, is presented as a case study. This year’s lectures also included a special focus on applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to drug discovery.

A tour of H3D’s well-equipped medicinal chemistry labs on UCT’s Upper Campus was also arranged to give the students a taste of the day-to-day life of a medical chemist. 

Article by Dr John Woodland