Drug Design MRes

This programme teaches students the latest methodologies and approaches and covers all aspects of drug design: drug discovery, computational and structural biology, screening, assay development, medicinal chemistry, and most importantly the industrial practices involved in modern drug design technology.

Students undertake modules to the value of 180 credits.

The programme consists of two core modules (30 credits), three optional modules (45 credits) and a dissertation/report (105 credits).

• Ethics and Regulation of Research
• Statistical Methods in Research

Students select three of the following.

• Bioinformatics and Structural Biology as applied to Drug Design
• Target Identification and High Throughput Screening
• Cheminformatics and Computer Drug Design
• Biological Molecules as Therapeutics - Antibodies, siRNA, and Stem Cells
• Biophysical Screening Methods, Protein NMR and Phenotypic Screening
• Fragment-based Drug Design
• Target Selection - Commercial and Intellectual Property Aspects
• Target Selection - Scientific Grounds
• Practical Laboratory Research Skills

All students undertake an independent research project which culminates in a dissertation of 15,000 to 20,000 words.

The programme is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars, tutorials and problem classes, critical journal clubs and a research project. Assessment is through coursework, practicals, laboratory work, examination, dissertation and oral presentation.