Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics

About the course

The course aims to provide basic knowledge of how bioinformatics tools can solve problems within pharmacology, pharmacy, and pharmaceutical chemistry. The course focuses primarily on understanding and using software rather than the underlying mathematical theories. The course contains an introduction and history of pharmaceutical bioinformatics, biological and chemical databases, theory and methods for analysing experimental data, design of experiments, calculation of drug candidate properties, proteochemistry, docking, and virtual drug screening.

On completion of the course you should be able to:

• understand and describe how bioinformatics tools can be used within pharmaceutical research
• use bio- and chemoinformatics programs for e.g. sequence alignment, 3D visualisation, and structure-activity relationship-based methods such as proteochemometrics
• seek relevant information in biological and chemical databases
• calculate the properties (descriptors) of potential drugs, and correlate these to target protein interactions through bioinformatic modelling
• interpret and validate the results of the above-mentioned methods.

Outline for distance course: The course is internet-based and has no mandatory meetings. The teaching consists of supervised individual studies via a web-based learning environment that is also used for group exercises, discussions and assignments. Communication between students and teachers is done via the course website and via email. To participate a computer with internet access is required. A written examination through the website ends the course.