Chemistry for Pharmacy Students: General, Organic and Natural Product Chemistry

Book Preface

The pharmacy profession and the role of pharmacists in the modernhealthcare systems have evolved quite rapidly over the last couple of decades. The services that pharmacists provide are expanding with the introduction of supplementary prescribing, provision of health checks, patient counselling and many others. The main ethos of pharmacy profession is now as much about keeping people healthy as treating them when they are not well. The modern pharmacy profession is shifting away from a product focus and towards a patient focus. To cope with these changes, and to meet the demand of the modern pharmacy profession, the pharmacy curriculum, especially in the developed world, has evolved significantly. In the western countries, almost all registered pharmacists are employed by the community and hospital pharmacies. As a consequence, the practice, law, management, care, prescribing science and clinical aspects of pharmacy have become the main components of pharmacy curriculum. In order to incorporate all these changes, naturally, the fundamental science components, e.g. chemistry, statistics, pharmaceutical biology, microbiology, pharmacognosy and a few other topics, have been reduced remarkably. The impact of these recent changes is more innocuous in the area of pharmaceutical chemistry.

As all drugs are chemicals, and pharmacy is mainly about the study of various aspects of drugs, including manufacture, storage, actions and toxicities, metabolisms and managements, chemistry still plays a vital role in pharmacy education. However, the extent at which chemistry used to be taught a couple of decades ago has certainly changed significantly. It has been recognized that while pharmacy students need a solid foundation in chemistry knowledge the extent cannot be the same as chemistry students may need.

There are several books on general, organic and natural product chemistry available today, but all of them are written in such a manner that the level is only suitable for undergraduate Chemistry students, not for Pharmacy undergraduates. Moreover, in most modern pharmacy curricula, general, organic and natural product chemistry is taught at the first and second year undergraduate levels only. There are also a limited number of Pharmaceutical Chemistry books available to the students, but none of them can meet the demand of the recent changes in pharmacy courses in the developed countries. Therefore, there has been a pressing need for a chemistry text covering the fundamentals of general, organic and natural product chemistry written at a correct level for the Pharmacy undergraduates. Physical(Preformulation) and  Analytical Chemistry (Pharmaceutical Analysis) are generally taught separately at year 2 and year 3 levels of any modern MPharm course, and there are a number of excellent and up-to-date texts available in these areas.

During our teaching careers, we have always struggled to find an appropriate book that can offer general, organic and natural product chemistry at the right level for Pharmacy undergraduate students, and address the current changes in pharmacy curricula all over the world, at least in the UK. We have always ended up recommending several books, and also writing notes for the students. Therefore, we have decided to address this issue by compiling a chemistry book for Pharmacy students, which will cover general, organic and natural product chemistry in relation to drug molecules. Thus, the aims of our book are to provide the fundamental knowledge and overview of all core topics related to general, organic and natural product chemistry currently taught in Pharmacy undergraduate courses in the UK, USA and various other developed countries, relate these topics to the better understanding of drug molecules and their development and meet the demand of the recent changes in pharmacy curricula. This book attempts to condense the essentials of general, organic and natural product chemistry into a manageable, affordable and student-friendly text, by concentrating purely on the basics of various topics without going into exhaustive detail or repetitive examples.

In Pharmacy undergraduate courses, especially in the UK, we get students of heterogeneous educational backgrounds; while some of them have very good chemistry background, the others have bare minimum or not at all. From our experience in teaching Pharmacy undergraduate students, we have been able to identify the appropriate level that is required for all these students to learn properly. While we recognise that learning styles and levels vary from student to student, we can still try to strike the balance in terms of the level and standard at a point, which is not too difficult or not too easy for any students, but will certainly be student friendly. Bearing this in mind, the contents of this book are organized and dealt with in a way that they are suitable for year 1 and year 2 levels of the pharmacy curriculum. While the theoretical aspects of various topics are covered adequately, much focus has been given to the applications of these theories in relation to drug molecules and their discovery and developments. Chapter 1 provides an overview of some general aspects of chemistry and their importance in modern life, with particular emphasis on medicinal applications, and brief discussions of various physical characteristics of drug molecules, e.g. pH, polarity and solubility. While Chapter 2 deals with the fundamentals of atomic structure and bonding, chapter 3 covers various aspects of stereochemistry. Chapter 4 incorporates organic functional groups, and various aspects of aliphatic, aromatic and heterocyclic chemistry, amino acids and nucleic acids and their pharmaceutical importance. Major organic reactions are covered adequately in Chapter 5, and various types of pharmaceutically important natural products are discussed in Chapter 6.

While the primary readership of this book is the Pharmacy undergraduate students (BPharm/MPharm), especially in their first and second years of study, the readership could also extend to the students of various other subject areas within Food Sciences, Life Sciences and Health Sciences who are not becoming chemists yet need to know the fundamentals of chemistry for their courses.

Dr Satyajit D Sarker
Dr Lutfun Nahar