Medicinal Chemistry

Medicinal chemistry is at the forefront in the discovery of new medicines at Boehringer Ingelheim (Canada) Ltd./Ltée., R&D.  Our research centre is home to over 50 medicinal chemists, making it one of the largest medicinal chemistry laboratories in Canada.  Organic chemists have access to highly specialized equipment that enables them to apply the most recent research methodologies to design and synthesize compounds that could lead to new therapeutic agents.  

Organic chemists are supported in their research efforts by the analytical chemistry laboratory. This lab uses some of the most advanced techniques, including high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), super critical fluid chromatograph (SFC) and mass spectrometry, to determine the chemical constitution, purity and physicochemical properties of samples.

In addition to traditional approaches, chemists use high-throughput parallel chemistry methodologies permitting the rapid and parallel synthesis and evaluation of large numbers of compound analogues.  Chemists work closely with the structural research team, which provides researchers access to computer-assisted design techniques (molecular modeling and virtual libraries) and chemoinformatics - not to mention nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and X-ray crystallography (diffraction) - to assist them in characterizing molecules and their properties on the atomic scale, either alone or bound to their biochemical targets.