Established in 1952, the Department of Medicinal Chemistry in School of Pharmacy at Fudan University is one of the earliest medicinal chemistry disciplines founded in China. The medicinal chemistry discipline started to offer the programs that granted master’s degree and doctor’s degree in 1981 and 1990, respectively. In the year of 1995, the school’s medicinal chemistry became one of the firstly honored Shanghai Key Disciplines, which formed one of the important sites for pharmaceutical talent trainings and new drug research and development. The department has its own laboratories and platforms such as pilot laboratory, analytical laboratory, cell culture room, chemical biology platform, and molecular simulation and design platform. Equipped with dozens of state of the art instruments like LC-MS, hydrogenating instrument, microwave reactor, solvent purification system, semi preparative HPLC, freeze-drying machine, multimode enzyme-labeled instrument, protein purification instrument, Nanodrop, gel imaging system, centrifugal machine, and temperature-controlled shaker, the Medicinal Chemistry Department has built up an innovative and functionally lined-up drug discovery platform.

The medicinal chemistry discipline is well known in the field of pharmaceutical sciences in China. In its very early days, the discipline was led by the famous organic and medicinal chemistry professors Yi Yang (studied in Japan), Wu sheng Song (studied in Europe), Kaiji Yuan (studied in the US), Yuwan Wu (studied in France) and other famous professors like Yisun Liu, Zhenyue Wang, Cuili Zhu from the pharmacy departments or schools of the long- standing universities like China-France University, Shanghai School of Pharmacy and Zhejiang University. After generations of great efforts under the leadership of the department heads Fen Xue, Jichang Dong, Maoqin Liu, Zhishan Zhou, Ren Wen, Peng Xia, Zhuibai, Qiu, Deyong Ye, and Yingxia Li, the department has made tons of progress and many achievements in teaching and research.