Following five years as an industrial medicinal chemist, Dr. Pat Forgione decided to return to academia and joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Concordia University as an Assistant Professor in 2008.
Find a list of courses he teaches regularly below. Please refer to the Online Class Schedule to find out when these courses are offered.
CHEM 498/620 Medicinal Chemistry (3 credits)
Prerequisites: CHEM 222, 235, 324. This course will provide an introduction to the small-molecule drug discovery process. It will begin with a general overview, followed by focused subsections that flow from early target identification, hit discovery, lead optimization, pre-clinical considerations, up to clinical trials.
The course will focus primarily on the rational design and synthesis of drugs that employ multidisciplinary approaches to satisfy a multitude of specificity and safety requirements. There will be a focus on organic synthesis within the special context of medicinal chemistry that illustrates the challenges involved in leveraging the opportunities presented by high throughput, parallel and/or combinatorial synthesis in light of physical limitations imposed by processing large numbers of compounds. Case studies from the current literature will be used to highlight how new technologies and strategies have overcome some of those limitations and will be used to highlight recent innovations in the field.
The course will also chart the evolution of powerful techniques from structural research (NMR, X-ray crystallography, and computational modeling) as fully integrated medicinal chemistry tools for modern drug-discovery using examples from the current literature to highlight key advances. This course is intended for a general audience and should be of particular interest to those considering a career in the pharmaceutical industry
CHEM 424 Organic Synthesis (3 credits)
Prerequisites: CHEM 222, 235, 324. This course is concerned with synthetic strategy and design. It provides an introduction to advanced synthetic methods and reagents, involving heteroatoms such as sulphur, phosphorus, tin and selenium, as well as an overview of the uses of protecting groups in organic chemistry.
The concept of retrosynthesis and a few asymmetric reactions are discussed using syntheses of natural products from the literature as examples.
CHEM 222 Introductory Organic Chemistry II (3 credits)
Prerequisites: CHEM 206, 221. Introduction to the use of IR and NMR spectroscopy for the identification of simple organic compounds. Benzene and aromatic compounds: aromaticity, electrophilic aromatic substitution, nucleophilic aromatic substitution, substituent effects.
Chemistry of aldehydes and ketones: nucleophilic addition, oxidation, reduction, and condensation reactions, tautomerism. Chemistry of carboxylic acids and their derivatives. Chemistry of alcohols, ethers, and related compounds. Amines: basicity, reactions.
Lectures and laboratory.
CHEM 393 Spectroscopy and Structure of Organic Compounds (3 credits)
Prerequisites: CHEM 221, 222. This course examines the identification of organic compounds using methods based on electronic, vibrational, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopies. In each case, there is an introduction to the principles of the spectroscopy and a discussion of how its spectra vary with structure.
Particular emphasis is placed upon the UV-visible spectra of conjugated molecules; the identification of functional groups by IR spectroscopy; the use of NMR spectroscopy, including 2D methods, for the determination of stereochemistry; and the use of mass spectrometry for ascertaining molecular constitution.
The use of computer simulation and information retrieval for structure determination is introduced.
Lectures and laboratory.
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