Are we in danger of falling back to the pre-antibiotic era? Can we deal with epidemics/pandemics of Ebola, Zika and Influenza virus? When will parasitic diseases like Malaria and Schistosomiasis be eliminated? What can you do yourself? These questions will be addressed in this course. A challenging assignment, to design a drug against a disease of choice, forms the core of this course. The course is given almost entirely online, so you can do it during your minor or major traineeship, even from abroad.

Subjects of the course are: virology/bacteriology/parasitology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, structural biology, immunology, and especially medicinal chemistry
 
Innovative drug research has a drug discovery and a drug development phase. In the drug discovery phase, chemists, or more precise, medicinal chemists make molecules and biologists, or more precise, pharmacologists, test these molecules.
 
In this course, we challenge the student to think of a medical need, to find a target, to come up with a lead and to optimise this lead towards a drug candidate. While performing this structure-based drug design project, the students will learn about medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, organic chemistry, biochemistry and some computational chemistry.