From Shennong tasting hundreds of herbs in ancient times to Chinese scientist Tu Youyou winning the Nobel Prize in 2015, seeking life-saving active ingredients from natural sources has always been one of the important approaches to drug discovery since ancient times. As one of the three major sources of drug discovery and design, what important role do natural medicines play? What gains can be achieved after studying this course? Now, the teachers of the Natural Medicinal Chemistry Teaching Team of Shenyang Pharmaceutical University will lead you into the colorful and scientific research-oriented classroom of Natural Medicinal Chemistry.
Natural Medicinal Chemistry is a course that studies the chemical components in natural medicines using modern scientific theories and methods. Its purpose is to explore safe and efficient natural medicines and lead compounds, expand medicinal resources, discover new active ingredients, and lay a foundation for new drug creation. It plays an important role in the modernization and internationalization of traditional Chinese medicine.
The design of the course content reflects the combination of basics and cutting-edge knowledge: it focuses on the systematicness of basic knowledge and emphasizes the breadth of knowledge, including the structural types, physical and chemical properties, extraction and separation methods, structural identification methods, biological activities, and biosynthetic pathways of various natural products; it also timely introduces scientific research achievements and disciplinary frontiers into teaching, so as to consolidate basic theories and methods with students, expand the depth and breadth of learning, and reveal the essence of natural medicines.
The course pays attention to the systematicness of basic knowledge, emphasizes the breadth of knowledge, combines basics with frontiers, and cultivates students' practical and innovative abilities. Based on Organic Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, Biochemistry, Pharmacology, etc., it lays a foundation for subsequent core courses such as Pharmacognosy, Pharmaceutics, Pharmaceutical Analysis, Identification of Chinese Materia Medica, and Processing of Chinese Materia Medica.
The course adopts various methods and means such as animations, videos, and three-dimensional structures to comprehensively, in-depth and systematically introduce professional knowledge of natural medicinal chemistry, and explain the difficult points of the course to learners in a simple and understandable way. By using visual dynamic teaching, abstract and boring basic theories are made vivid and rich, thereby breaking the silence in teaching, establishing an open autonomous learning mode, and enabling learners to fully understand and master the key points of the course.
