Free online medicinal chemistry course at Davidson College

I wanted to alert interested readers to an introductory course on medicinal chemistry by Prof. Erland Stevens at Davidson College that seems to cover pretty much every basic and important aspect of drug discovery and medicinal chemistry that I can recall. 

As Prof. Stevens mentioned in an email, "The overall goal of the course is to get a student up to speed to watch a medicinal chemistry lecture (and maybe even ask a question at the end)." While the material may be a little too basic for readers of this (or Derek's) blog, it seems quite valuable for high-school or college students, and even for more experienced professionals who might want to brush up on their drug science.

The best part is that the course is free and available online.

Here's the website: https://www.edx.org/course/davidsonx/davidsonx-001x-medicinal-chemistry-1220

And here's the list of topics:

Week 1 – brief history of medicinal chemistry, introduction to drug development process and regulatory approval

Week 2 – proteins (enzymes and receptors) as drug targets, enzyme inhibition, ligand-receptor binding theory

Week 3 – pharmacokinetics (compartment models, Vd, clearance)

Week 4 – metabolism, phase I, phase II, prodrugs, genetic variability

Week 5 – drug-target complementarity, drugs as part of chemical space, chemical libraries

Week 6 – lead discovery, screening, filtering hits by metrics/structural alerts/predicted PK, SOSA, natural products

Week 7 – lead optimization, functional group replacements, isosteres, directed libraries, peptidomimetics