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Availability: Full-time 1 year
Credits
Students undertake modules to the value of 180 credits. The programme consists of five taught modules (75 credits), and a research/dissertation (105 credits).
Complusory Modules
MEDC0049: Ethics and Regulation of Research (Term 1, 15 credits)
MEDC0084: Research project (105 credits - start January).
Optional Modules
Students will select four from the following modules (15 credits each):
Term 1
MEDC0075: Bioinformatics and Structural Biology as applied to Drug Design
MEDC0076: Target Identification, Pharmacology and High Throughput Screening
MEDC0077: Cheminformatics and Modelling for Drug Design
MEDC0078: Biological Molecules as Therapeutics - Antibodies, siRNA, and Stem Cells
Term 2
MEDC0079: Biophysical screening methods, X-ray crystallography, protein NMR and phenotypic screening.
MEDC0080: Fragment-based Drug Design
MEDC0081: Target Selection - Scientific Grounds
MEDC0082: Target Selection - Commercial and Intellectual Property Aspects
MEDC0066: Practical Laboratory Research Skills
Research Project and Dissertation
MEDC0084 - 105 credits - start January.
All students undertake an independent research project which culminates in a dissertation of 15,000 to 20,000 words. Research project - minimum 5 months and can be selected from expert groups in UCL - e.g. Cancer Institute, Royal Free Hospital, MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology, Medicine, etc. Examples of research projects are as follows:
| Screening, Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry |
| Optimization of small molecule drug inhibition of a kinase targets for therapy of Polycystic Kidney Disease |
| Towards novel antibiotics: small molecule inhibitors of the serine/threonine protein kinases of Gram positive bacterial pathogens |
| Probing host-HIV interactions using small molecule inhibitors |
| Medicinal Chemistry |
| Exploration of a new scaffold as a potential new class of a kinase inhibitor |
| Modified analogues of an established scaffold with potential for the treatment of neurodegenerative conditions |
| Computational, Cheminformatics, Bioinformatics, and computer-based literature projects |
| Drug repositioning using internal technology |
| Fragment-based design of peptidomimetic drugs |
| Natural hormones and neurotransmitters as drug leads |
| Structural and Molecular Biology |
| Crystal structure determination of protein-ligand complexes |
| Cloning and NMR study of Drug protein target |
| PK/ADME, Assay development |
| Development of PK/ADME assay for a Cancer project |
Teaching and Learning
The programme is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars, tutorials and problem classes, critical journal clubs and research project. Assessment is through coursework, practicals, laboratory work, examination, dissertation and oral presentation.
Options
There are no optional modules for this programme.
