Pharmaceutical Chemistry is a stimulating discipline which links many scientific disciplines and allows for collaboration with researchers from other disciplines like biologists, toxicologists, pharmacologists, theoretical chemists, microbiologists, and bio-pharmacists in developing new drugs. Pharmaceutical Chemistry includes Inorganic Chemistry; Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry and Medicinal and analytical.
Inorganic chemistry mainly deals with preparation, chemical properties and assay of different inorganic compounds which are used as drugs. The subject also focuses on the qualitative chemical limit tests of these inorganic ions. The chemical assays of different inorganic drugs are discussed with the chemistry involved in it, as these chemical assays are employed by the pharmaceutical industries and regulatory agencies as a quality control tool.
Organic chemistry mainly focuses on the chemical reactions which are employed in the synthesis and chemical properties of different classes of organic compounds and heterocyclic rings which are present in drug compounds.
Medicinal chemistry core aims to discover and synthesize biologically active small molecules as research tools and drug leads. It mainly focuses on multi-step synthesis for creation of new synthetic drug and isolation of medicinal agents. New molecules with potential pharmaceutical interest or compounds are generated by computational or combinatorial chemistry.
Analytical chemistry deals with interpretation, analysis, quality assessment and quality control studies of raw material and finished products. Separation of the active compound is done using several chromatographic techniques like TLC, HPLC, HPTLC, Ion exchange chromatography etc. High pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) and its coupling with high-throughput screening (HST) assays simplify the purification and isolation of active compounds. The subject mainly deals with the in-depth study of modern analytical techniques like UV spectroscopy, IR spectroscopy, Atomic absorption spectroscopy, mass and NMR spectroscopy. Chromatographic techniques are employed by the pharmaceutical industries in their pharmaceutical research and as a quality control tool.