Hallo, I'm Professor Catharine Esterhuysen of the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science
and today I'm going to tell you about the BSc programme
looking at the Applied Medicinal Chemistry stream.
So I'm sure that the first thing that comes up in your mind is: “what is Applied Medicinal Chemistry?”
Well, it's a broad, multi-disciplinary programme that integrates Chemistry and Biology
in a very interesting way. So you're going to be looking at Physiology,
so that's the study of living organisms from the cellular level where you look at the molecular
and chemical processes that take place, all the way through to the living body
and how it interacts with the environment. In Chemistry you're going to be studying
the behaviour and properties of chemical substances and how they react.
And in Biochemistry you're going to apply that knowledge to the living body.
There's also a smattering of Botany and Patent Law in order to prepare you for a career in the medical, pharmaceutical
and allied health science industries like, for instance, companies that make dietary supplements.
So what do Applied Medicinal Chemists do? Well, a whole bunch of different things.
First of all, they can identify pharmaceutically active compounds in natural sources like plants, fungi, sea kelp, things like that.
They can also make new drugs, so take existing drugs and use design principles
to develop similar compounds or they can take a completely new approach to developing drugs.
And to do that they need to have an understanding of the physiological and pathophysiological basis
of diseases, in other words how they work, where do they come from and so on.
And, finally. Applied Medicinal Chemists can then test these
new drugs on theoretical models, or cells and animals to see how effective they are.
So for instance, on the left-hand side you see a theoretical model of an enzyme
in the malaria parasite plasmodium falciparum – the thin lines are the enzyme, and the thick lines
are a model drug, which is fitting into the active site, so the lock of the enzyme.
And if it fits in there it means that it can prevent the enzyme from doing its normal work
and in that way interferes with the transmission of the parasite to humans.
On the right-hand side you can see the fluorescent images of cells.
On top are cancer cells that have been untreated, whereas at the bottom
you can see what a cancer cell looks like after it has been treated with the chemotherapeutic drug, doxorubicin.
And those blue dots that have been marked with the yellow arrow, show you where there has been cell death.
So in this way, they can identify whether the drugs are doing their job.
They can also look at natural substances, like for instance, garlic. An Applied Medicinal Chemist has
studied the processes of cooking and determined that if you have some components within the garlic,
they react in the cooking process to eventually form a compound called ajoene.
And ajoene then interacts with an enzyme in the human body that basically docks into this
space, you can see it there in that protein, and has an anti-inflammatory effect, similar to what aspirin has.
So this is very important for the prevention of cancer.
Ajoene can also go further and it can be applied to prevent the formation of cancer and even treat cancer.
And we know from testing that it has very few side effects in comparison to many other drugs.
We can also go and identify how ajoene kills cancer cells by basically reacting
with the protein and unfolding it, and when it's unfolded then that kills off the cancer cell.
As Hippocrates says: eat your garlic!!
In order to work in this exciting field what kind of subjects will you have to take?
At first-year level you're going to do a very generic, broad Chemistry and Biology curriculum
to give you a broad background for everything that you're going to need further on,
so you're going to do Biology, Chemistry, Maths, Physics and Science in Context.
At second-year level you then start to narrow down your focus and you end up doing
Biochemistry, so that's the study of chemical processes in the body,
Chemistry (I'm sure you all know what that is) and
Physiology which is understanding the chemical processes
and the physiological processes on cellular level within the body.
You also have to do Biometry, which is the statistical analysis of biological data.
At third-year, so in the final year of your BSc you then end up doing Chemistry and Physiology,
as well as a module of Botany, so that you have an understanding of plant form and function to help
you in identifying new substances that can be biologically active in plants.
There's also some patent law so that if you develop a new drug that you can protect your intellectual property.
We always recommend that you don't just stop at third-year, that you carry on and do an
Honours programme and this BSc programme would allow you to do an Honours in either Chemistry,
or in Physiology, so that you can then register as a professional scientist.
And if you really want to get in-depth into the field of Applied Medicinal Chemistry we also
suggest that you continue on and do an MSc and a PhD.
What do you need in order to get there? You have to have done Afrikaans or English as your home
language or as your first additional language and got a 4 for that,
you need to have a 6 for Mathematics and you need to have a 4 for Physical Sciences.
So I hope to see you very soon in the BSc Applied Medicinal Chemistry stream, so that you can be
prepared for an exciting career in the medical, pharmaceutical or allied health sciences field!
If you want some more information, here is a list of people who are Applied Medicinal Chemists
working in the department of Chemistry and Polymer Science or in the department of Physiology.
So I encourage you to go and have a look at what exciting work they're doing.
If you need any information you can contact me at the department of Chemistry and Polymer Science or
you can contact Professor Engelbrecht of the department of Physiology for more details.
Thank you for listening and I hope to see you soon. Bye!