This course provides an overview over the concepts and processes employed in today's drug discovery and development. It has an introductory character but will also provide more detailed insights employing real life examples. The course combines lectures and interactive elements which require active participation of the students.

The course provides a platform for the investigation, presentation and discussion of a topic with relevance to the field of pharmaceutical sciences. Students work in small groups on a chosen topic and present their work on a one day symposium.

First identification with Pharmaceutical Sciences; motivation for profiling in the Natural Sciences, which are focused on within the first two years as a preparation for the specialized studies; sensitization for the duties and the responsibilities of a person with a federal diploma in Pharmacy; information about job opportunities.

The lecture series takes place at the ETH Hönggerberg and covers a variety of major activities involved in drug discovery: selecting drug targets, technologies used in drug discovery, small, medium and large drugs, objectives of the medicinal chemist, assessing drug safety, principles of personalized medicine, designing clinical trials, how intellectual property is protected, as well as others.

The course introduces the methods, tools, and technologies of Gene Technology for applications in biomedical research, drug discovery, and therapy development.

The course enables the student to understand and and apply the general concepts of gene technology, including recombinant DNA technology and its application in genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. Protein cloning, expression and modifications and bimolecular interactions will be discussed. The concept of display technology and its applications in the field of drug discovery will be presented.

First identification with Pharmaceutical Sciences; motivation for profiling in the Natural Sciences, which are focused on within the first two years as a preparation for the specialized studies; sensitization for the duties and the responsibilities of a person with a federal diploma in Pharmacy; information about job opportunities.

On average one drug per year is withdrawn from the market. Using selected examples of such drug failures, the course aims at analyzing and discussing the present explanations of drug actions as well as the design and predictive power of animal models and clinical trials. In addition, the ethical, societal, and economical expectations in new drugs shall be reflected and discussed.

The course comprises experiments relating to concepts of medicinal chemistry including statistical processing, fitting of experimental data, computer modeling of protein structures, experimental measurement of affinity constants and kinetic dissociation constants for protein ligands. The chemical stability of a drug will be studied. Basic gene cloning and protein expression will be introduced.

State-of-the-art information on drug discovery and development by experts from academia and industry.