Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacology involved with designing, synthesizing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes the study of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR). Pharmaceutical chemistry is focused on quality aspects of medicines and aims to assure fitness for the purpose of medicinal products.
Compounds used as medicines are overwhelmingly organic products. However, metal-containing compounds have been found to be useful as drugs. For example, the cis-platin series of platinium-containing complexes have found use as anti-cancer agents. This type of compounds are known as metal-based drugs.
Medicinal chemistry is a highly interdisciplinary science combining organic chemistry with biochemistry, computational chemistry, pharmacology, pharmacognosy, molecular biology, statistics, and physical chemistry.