Cheminformatics and Toxicology University of Galway

Overview

The Cheminformatics and Toxicology programme at University of Galway is delivered over one year by the disciplines of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Mathematics and Chemistry.

What makes this course unique...

• Integrated training in toxicology and computational approaches (analytics) to develop a highly marketable skill-set for a career in the Pharma industry or organizations that regulate chemical safety
• Guest lecturers from regulators and industry that teach from "real-life" cases and that can provide career development advice
• An independent research project focussed on solving real world toxicity/toxicity assessment problems

Careers

It costs approximately $1bn and 10–20 years to get a drug from conception to market. While many candidate molecules enter the drug development pipeline, most will fail to become drugs, mainly due to unexpected toxicity. The failure to identify toxicity early in the development process costs the pharmaceutical industry billions of dollars in either failed clinical trials or in withdrawing drugs from the market. At the same time national and trans-national regulatory bodies work to identify the toxicity of chemicals used in food-stuffs, consumer products, industry and agriculture with the aim of building a chemically safe society. Consequently the global ADME toxicology testing market, which aims to identify potential toxicity is projected to surpass $16.2 billion by 2024. In an era when Pharma investment in research and development is falling, scientists to develop and use computational tools that better predict toxicity are at a premium. The value of these skills is further enhanced by the scarcity of training programmes to produce toxicologists with the appropriate computational skills.