Medicinal Chemistry and Biotherapeutics: Overview and Definitions

Medicinal chemistry is an old discipline and a fast-evolving interdisciplinary research area that aims to improve human, animal, and vegetal life by creating and developing medicines to fight diseases. The medicines could be small-molecule drugs or biotherapeutics. This chapter includes some definitinions related to small-molecule drugs and biotherapeutics, medicinal chemistry, the pipeline for creating medicines and to the medicines themselves.