The recent Faculty development seminar was delivered by Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences Dr. Arunkumar Subramani on 27 December 2017. The title of his presentation was ‘Synthetic utility of Schiff bases in Medicinal Chemistry’ and attended by Faculty members of College of Pharmacy and other affiliated colleges of the Gulf Medical University.
As a preamble, Dr. Arunkumar enlightened the various sources of origin of new medicines such as random screening for potential drugs, mechanism-based drug design, modification of lead molecule and mixed approaches. He continued explaining the utility of Schiff bases in the synthesis of various heterocyclic nuclei which forms the lead molecule for many commercially available medicines.
In his presentation, Dr. Arunkumar substantiated that Schiff bases, upon extrapolation, are versatile pharmacophores with multiple biological activities and highlighted few of his research publications on the same. He also reviewed the medicinally important heterocyclic compounds derived from Schiff bases and finally comprehended their clinical utility.
The Dean of College of Pharmacy, Dr. Sherief Khalifa participated in the discussion and highlighted the potential scope for research related to Schiff bases. Other attendees of the seminar highlighted their perspectives on Schiff bases and a provided their views on a plausible structure-activity relationship between the heterocyclic compounds elucidated from Schiff bases and their safety perspectives.
The content of the presentation is available at [Link]