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Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacy involved with designing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use.
Commonly, terpenes contain 2, 3, 4 or 6 isoprene units; the tetraterpenes (8 isoprene units) form a separate class of compounds called carotenoids; the others are rare. The basic unit isoprene itself is a hemiterpene. It may form oxygen-containing derivatives such as prenol and isovaleric acid analogous to terpenoids.
Phytochemistry is the study of phytochemicals, which are chemicals derived from plants.Phytochemists strive to describe the structures of the large number of secondary metabolites found in plants, the functions of these compounds in human and plant biology, and the biosynthesis of these compounds.
They are the largest class of plant secondary metabolites, representing about 60% of known natural products. [3] Many terpenoids have substantial pharmacological bioactivity and are therefore of interest to medicinal chemists. [4] Plant terpenoids are used for their aromatic qualities and play a role in traditional herbal remedies.
In modern computational chemistry, pharmacophores are used to define the essential features of one or more molecules with the same biological activity. A database of diverse chemical compounds can then be searched for more molecules which share the same features arranged in the same relative orientation.
[9] [10] Many have found use in traditional or modern medicine, or as starting points for drug discovery. Other alkaloids possess psychotropic (e.g. psilocin ) and stimulant activities (e.g. cocaine , caffeine , nicotine , theobromine ), [ 11 ] and have been used in entheogenic rituals or as recreational drugs .
Drug metabolism is the metabolic breakdown of drugs by living organisms, usually through specialized enzymatic systems. More generally, xenobiotic metabolism (from the Greek xenos "stranger" and biotic "related to living beings") is the set of metabolic pathways that modify the chemical structure of xenobiotics, which are compounds foreign to an organism's normal biochemistry, such as any drug ...
5-10% of the drug (active substance); 80% of fillers, disintegrants, lubricants, glidants, and binders; and; 10% of compounds which ensure easy disintegration, disaggregation, and dissolution of the tablet in the stomach or the intestine. The dissolution time can be modified for a rapid effect or for sustained release.