COMPUTER-ASSISTED CLASSES ON MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY OF BARBITURATES AND THIOBARBITURATES

The purpose of this study is elaboration of computer classes for pharmacy or chemistry students on ADMET parameters of barbiturates and thiobarbiturates in the context of their molecular structure and gathering students' feedback on the classes. Barbiturates and thiobarbiturates are derivatives of barbituric acid and thiobarbituric acid, respectively. These drugs, depending on clear differences in their structure, exert a variety of effects on the central nervous system, ranging from mild sedation to total anesthesia. Barbiturates may be used as hypnotics, anxiolytics and anticonvulsants whereas thiobarbiturates can be applied for the induction of general anesthesia. At present barbiturates are usually replaced by benzodiazepines which are less dangerous at overdose. Nevertheless, they remain a model group of drugs to discuss structure-activity relationship, in particular the effect of lipophilicity on the activity profile. The presented computer-assisted classes were designed by taking into consideration the common problems which many students experiense when they learn medicinal chemistry.The classes make use of freely available web services only and consist of the following steps: (1) calculation of lipophilicity of selected barbiturates and thiobarbiturates with several algorithms offered by Virtual Computational Chemistry Laboratory web service;(2) discussion of relationship between the lipophilicity value and activity profile;(3) calculation of other ADMET parameters (e.g. plasma protein binding, blood-brain barrier penetration, human intestinal absorption) of barbiturates and thiobarbiturates with PREADMET web service and ADMEBoxes web service (demo version) . The classes were highly approved by students and may be utilized in education of pharmacy and chemistry but also biology and medicine students.