Organical chemistry

The discipline of Organic Chemistry exists since the academic year 1992/1993, having, at the beginning, only one associate professor, associated professor dr. Dan Ciubotariu, who laid the foundations of the discipline, contributing essentially to the establishment of the Faculty of Pharmacy. Until 1996, the practical works of Organic Chemistry were carried out in the laboratory of the Organic Chemistry discipline of the Polytechnic University of Timisoara. Since the academic year 1996/1997 the practical works have been carried out in the organic chemistry laboratory of the Faculty of Pharmacy within UMF “Victor Babes” Timisoara and, starting with the academic year 2013/2014, in the modern laboratory of the new building of the Faculty of Pharmacy. Over time, within the discipline they functioned as associated professors: professor dr. Carol Csunderlik, associated professor dr. Ioan Iorga, associated professor dr. Mihai Medeleanu and lecturer dr. Vasile Berceanu from the Organic Chemistry discipline of the Faculty of Industrial Chemistry from the Politehnica Timisoara, and as members of the discipline: professor dr. Dan Ciubotariu, assistant professor Marian Pasăre and lecturer Adrian Grozav. Currently, the discipline is composed of: assoc. prof. dr. Vicenţiu Vlaia, assoc. prof. dr. Tudor Olariu and lecturer dr. Marius Preda.

The study of organic chemistry within our discipline aims to familiarizing the pharmacy student with the organic molecules, from the smallest and simplest (for example, methane) to the most complex (biological macromolecules such as carbohydrates, peptides, proteins and nucleic acids), including biologically active molecular structures – drugs and their physico-chemical properties. The goal of the organic chemistry course is to learn not only what happens during the transformations of organic compounds (which would reduce the study of organic chemistry to the memorization of a very large number of chemical reactions), but also how it happens and why, which ensures familiarity with the scientific and predictive way of thinking. The practical works of organic chemistry provides, besides the in-depth understanding of the transformations of the organic compounds described in the course, the acquisition of some basic experimental techniques used for the evaluation of the physico-chemical properties, the qualitative and quantitative elemental analysis, the spectroscopic analysis and the synthesis of organic molecules.

The fundamental objective of the Organic Chemistry discipline consists in ensuring the cognitive and applicative-practical skills, as well as the communication and relational skills necessary for students activity in the higher cycle, clinicall and, further, in the practice of the profession of pharmacist, in its various specific field – pharmacy, pharmaceutical industry, drug research, drug and food control laboratories,  Clinical pharmacy – knowing that drugs are mainly organic chemical compounds.

The scientific activity within the discipline of Organic Chemistry has approached over time, the following areas:

• Organic synthesis (intermediate compounds for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry)
• Pattern Recognition with applications in chemistry: construction of a software package including theoretical-decimal and statistical methods as well as linguistic methods – SARF = System for Automatic Pattern Recognition – and its application for the interpretation of infrared (IR) spectra in chromosome, urolith and medical diagnostic problems as well as in QSAR (Chemical Structure Activity Relationship) for the recognition of bioactive compounds.
• Quantitative treatment of steric effects: using integration methods based on Monte Carlo techniques, a number of molecular descriptors of the shape and size of molecules and substituents – van der Waals volume and surface area, synthetic indicators of shape and size – have been developed and used with success in the quantitative treatment of reactivity in organic chemistry (in nucleophilic substitution reactions, esterification, hydrolysis of esters, etc.). At the same time, they have been applied in QSAR (chemical structure-biological activity relationships) studies to test the nature of the receptor-effect interaction and the form of the biological receptor. The recent introduction of new shape and molecular size parameters, compressibility, ovality and globularity parameters, has allowed the extension of research in the field of QSTR (see Roberto Todeschini , Viviana Consonni, Molecular Descriptors for Chemoinformatics, Wiley – VCH, 2009, p.147, 688: Ciubotariu shape indices).
• Chemical topology: the quantification of structure based on topological models allowed the introduction of new topological indices that took into consideration the reciprocal distance matrix and differentiation of heteroatoms. The new topological indices have been successfully applied in the study of the chemical structure-physical-chemical properties relationship.

The current research aims to develop novel molecular descriptors with enhanced structural information potential for biological activity modelling studies to optimize drug design.