a.a. 2020/2021

The demise of the vitalistic theory of organic chemistry in the first half of the 19th century can be considered the starting point for modern studies on the origin of life. Since we do not know the time and the conditions where life originated, the area is highly speculative, and the whole field of pre-biotic chemistry controversial. Nevertheless, by comparatively analyzing the biochemical machinery and the landscape of secondary metabolites production of what are considered the most primitive forms of life, some educated guesses can be made, if not on how life started, at least on the strategies it followed to evolve. 

Nel corso del Rinascimento fiorisce una ricca produzione di testi sia scientifici che letterari dedicati alla melancolia amorosa, considerata all'epoca come una vera e propria malattia. Cause, sintomi e rimedi vengono descritti e analizzati in opere di natura diversa (trattati di medicina e farmacologia, testi filosofici, poetici, narrativi e teatrali...) ma strettamente interconnesse. A partire dal primo Cinquecento, inoltre, si osserva sia in ambito medico e farmacologico che in ambito letterario un interesse crescente per le malattie veneree: anche in questo caso, i contatti fra scienza e letteratura si rivelano numerosi e fecondi. Il presente corso intende fornire un'introduzione alle questioni qui evocate, rilevando differenti modalità di interazione tra farmacologia e letteratura: nella prima Modernità, infatti, tali rapporti sono estremamente articolati e non procedono in un unico senso, poichà se la scienza informa la letteratura, la letteratura informa a sua volta la ricerca scientifica. Muovendo dall'analisi di un corpus di testi dei secoli XVI-XVII, sarà possibile portare in conclusione uno sguardo più ampio sull'evoluzione delle relazioni tra farmacologia e letteratura nei secoli seguenti, osservando come, per lungo tempo, questi due campi abbiano fittamente dialogato. 

Bioorganic chemistry deals with the application of the tools of chemistry to the understanding of biochemical processes. The aim of the course is to provide a basic knowledge of bioorganic chemistry: starting from its key concepts, the course will develop through the analogies between organic reactions and biochemical transformations, the catalytic mechanisms of several classes of enzymes and their use in organic synthesis and in the production of APIs. 

The course aims at presenting and discussing the major techniques used for the study of proteins structures and functions, and the contributions of structural biology in the study of diseases and in the research of new drugs. 

The interdisciplinary course will provide an overview of the immunomodulatory activity of gut microbiota and its impact on cancer onset, progression and response to therapy. Approaches to modulate gut microbiota composition to enhance response to cancer therapy will be also discussed. 

The course will tackle the issue of drug evaluation from different perspectives, from the need to choose for single individuals with no therapeutic alternatives to the need to choose whether to reimburse a drug for an entire nation or to list a drug on the WHO essential medicines list. Along the way, the drug regulatory framework will be introduced. 

The Università del Piemonte Orientale is a pilot center for the School of INN of the World Health Organization. In this privileged position, the course will introduce international non-proprietary names (INN: i.e. the name that is given to any marketed drug and that does not belong to the company) and the schemes and rules that govern their creation. The course will then have a practical element of reviewing names, which may result in a research publication. 

The course will be an introduction to systematic reviews and meta-analysis, an indispensable tool for research and for Ph.D. students. Alongside theory, the students will be coordinated in a scientific project of meta-analysis that may result in a research publication. 

Animal models can provide invaluable information to our knowledge of biology and medicine, including the discovery and development of new drugs. At present the overall success rate of drugs during clinical development remains rather low and one commonly raised explanation is flawed preclinical research in animal models. This is especially true in therapeutic areas in which animal models of human diseases are particularly challenging. Based on these assumptions, better design and conduct as well as further development of animal models is certainly essential. The short course highlights, with discussion of successful and unsucceful case studies, the current challenges and limitations of selected animal models and points at aspects which may be relevant for improving the translational value of such models in drug discovery. 

This interdisciplinary course is targeted at students who wish to learn the basics and challenges of drug discovery and drug screening in information rich cell-based models. In the first part of the course (Grilli), aspects of assay design ranging from cell type choice, readout selection, standardization, miniaturization, high content analysis, will be covered. Moreover, advantages of targeted versus phenotypic assays in drug screening will be discussed. At the end, participants will be challenged in a competition to propose a cell-based assay that could be potentially relevant for their own research projects/interests. The second part of the course (Pirali) is devoted to providing PhD students engaged in the early drug discovery process with the concepts, the strategies and the methodologies that assist the identification of high-quality drug candidates. This is of utmost importance, as of the thousands of novel compounds that a drug discovery project leads to, only a fraction of these have sufficient ADMET properties to become a clinical candidate. 

Calcium is an important second messenger whose intracellular concentration is dynamically regulated in a spatio-temporal manner. Components of "calcium signaling toolkit" represent pharmacological targets for numerous diseases. The course will provide basic knowledge on mechanisms of cellular calcium homeostasis, will illustrate principles of the deregulation of calcium signaling in disease; and will provide practical training in single-cell fluorescent calcium imaging. 

For PhD students, the prospect of writing their very own scientific research paper may be both exciting and hard. The goal of this course is to provide effective tools to improve writing skills and manuscript writing process.

Organic chemistry and pharmacognosy have long been an almost unique discipline, with natural products acting as a major driver of advancement for both areas. With the advent of molecular assays, the development of spectroscopy, and the growing sophistication of current synthetic organic chemistry, a comprehensive technical expertise in both fields has become impossible and natural products research has become sectarian and articulated in several sub-disciplines. In this scenario, the role of organic chemistry has undergone a change, moving from a tool of structure elucidation to a mean to manipulate natural products structures and explore their associated biological space. In this context, organic chemistry is metamorphosing into medicinal chemistry, but the transition is essentially molecular in nature, and has been well managed, with organic chemistry retaining a critical role in the development of a scalable synthesis for natural products difficult and/or expensive to obtain by isolation. 1 On the other hand, there is growing evidence that, rather than magic bullets, natural products are magic shotguns, targeting a host of molecular end-points that are often part of homeostatic feed-back loops difficult to perturb with focused monomolecular agents. 2 In this context, mixtures of products like extracts might play an important role, but working with mixtures rather than monomolecular agents is a challenging task that is only now coming of age. 

The course will give an overview of the molecular mechanisms underlying immune recognition in cancer, the up-to date approaches to harness anti-tumor activities of immune cells and the major challenges that remain to be overcome. 

The course aims to enrich the theoretical knowledge of statistics and probability with suitable data analysis skills; the course focuses also on data visualization and is based on the free and open source software R.

The aim of this course is to present and show the potentiality of the archetypical click reactions (CuAAC, Bertozzi copper free click chemistry, Staudinger ligation, SuFex, Thiolo-ene reaction) in different areas of research such as drug discovery, bioconjugation, in vivo imaging. In the first part, the molecular mechanisms of these reactions will be presented and discussed, while in the second part of the course will be presented real applications of these techniques.