|
|
 |
Educational fields |
|
| Most drugs are organic compounds, which suppress or promote function of the target biomolecules, such as enzymes, receptors, and nucleic acids. Pharmacological effects are derived from interaction between a target biomolecule and a drug, which can be explained by organic chemistry. From this viewpoint, we study mechanism of drug action and drug design, based on organic chemistry, including ligand-based and structure-based drug design, lead generation and lead-optimization. |
| ■Organic and Natural Product Chemistry Toward Drug Development |
| Here you learn purification methods of bioactive natural products as well as techniques for structure elucidation and stereochemical assignments of them by using two dimensional NMR, high resolution mass spectrometry, and so on. You also learn applications of bioactive natural products to studies of life sciences as well as drug developments. Moreover, studies and education are concerned with analyses of molecules in a retrosynthetic sense and development of highly selective synthetic reactions, which lead to total syntheses of complex, architecturally novel, biologically active, but scarce, natural products. |
| ■Organometallic Reaction Chemistry |
| Recently, the use of transition metal complexes for the synthetic organic chemistry has been rapidly extended, and many extraordinary organic transformations have been realized. This program is intended to introduce students an exciting, rapidly growing interdisciplinary subject for organometallic chemistry. Students will also learn the utilization of various reactions promoted by metal complexes for the synthetic organic chemistry, including the synthesis of complex molecules and applications to the catalytic asymmetric synthesis. |
| ■Cellular and Molecular Pharmaceutical Sciences |
| Genes control the life through the actions of their coding products, functional proteins or enzymes, and through those of biomolecules produced by enzymes. In this educational field, students will study the systems regulating the physiological functions, intracellular dynamics, and metabolisms of functional proteins and lipids. Based on these studies, they will understand the molecular mechanisms governing important cellular events including the cell cycle progression, cell division, differentiation, and morphogenesis. Moreover, they will learn the relationships between abnormalities in protein and/or lipid metabolisms and disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and dyslipidemia. The acquired knowledge should be beneficial to the students to explore novel targets for drug development and to create innovative therapeutics for serious diseases. |
| ■Molecular and Cellular Pharmacobiology |
| Drug therapy significantly contributes to the treatment for various diseases. Recent progress in understanding of cellular and molecular mechanisms for inter-/intra-cellular signal transmission/transduction systems in a living body has revealed the molecular mechanisms for pharmacological effects of therapeutic drugs. This lecture is on the basic mechanisms and recent advances for the inter-/intra-cellular signaling systems related to apoptosis, protein/lipid sorting, neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric disorders. In addition, the molecular mechanisms for the actions of therapeutic drugs on such signaling systems will be discussed. |
| ■Functional Genomics in Medicine |
| Current genome information enables us to create novel medicines in conjunction with recent expansion in the knowledge of disease-related genes. Reflecting advance of the genome projects, our focus in the lecture is to learn the molecular mechanism by which the gene expression systems are going on without any problem and the genome repair systems work correctly in healthy subjects. How the systems are aberrant in patients with diseases comes within the scope of our investigation once we have the scenario of these genome biological systems. The knowledge of the genome will be applicable to development of new therapies for inherited and acquired diseases including cancer, infection and metabolic syndromes. |
| Many cellular functions are based on the reception and the response against external or internal stimuli, which is so-called signal transduction. For the detailed understanding on the mechanism, knowledge of the structure of molecules such as proteins that are involving in the transduction is indispensable. Hence, this group (?) investigates and teaches how to solve the 3-D structure of proteins and how to analyze their function, aiming the development of new medicines from the molecular stand of views. |
| ■Pharmacokinetics and Drug Delivery Systems |
| It is important to analyze drug disposition in the body, since we need to control drug concentration in the blood (plasma) as well as at the site of action. In this program, students will learn how to optimize the dosage form to maximize the therapeutic effect and minimize the side effects. Students will also learn the basics of gene delivery for advanced gene therapy in the near future. |
|
