A formal home for computational pharmacy at Hanoi University of Pharmacy

University decision · 24 October 2025

On 24 October 2025 the Rector of Hanoi University of Pharmacy, Nguyễn Hải Nam, signed Decision 1114/QĐ-DHN establishing the Unit of Computation and AI Application Research under the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology. Four days later, Decision 1125/QĐ-DHN assigned Dr. Đỗ Thị Mai Dung the duties of Head of the Unit.

What the decision changed

Computational research had been building in the Faculty for years, carried by projects and by students who kept coming back to it. In October 2025 it was given a name, a mandate and a place on the University’s organisational chart — which means it can be assigned work, resourced and built on.

What the University asked the unit to do

The decision sets out the unit’s function as advising the University and the Faculty on organising and carrying out research that applies computation and artificial intelligence, in both research and teaching. Its assigned tasks are specific, and worth reading as a description of the work rather than as administrative language:

Screening and design

Build computational and simulation models that identify compounds with potential biological activity, aimed at the discovery and development of new drugs.

Pharmacokinetics and safety

Build models that predict pharmacokinetic parameters, toxicity and adverse effects — the properties that decide whether an active compound can ever become a medicine.

Simulation and mechanism

Apply quantum chemical calculation, molecular-level simulation and binding affinity estimation to study how a structure acts on a molecular target, and why.

AI on large datasets

Apply artificial intelligence to network pharmacology and omics data, to find therapeutic targets of natural compounds, medicinal materials and traditional remedies.

Teaching and curriculum

Advise the Faculty and the University on developing training programmes that build digital competence in the relevant fields.

People and collaboration

Connect research groups inside the Faculty and the University, provide computational consultancy to groups working on drug development, and run research training for school pupils and students in AI applied to medicine and pharmacy.

Where the chemistry comes in

The unit’s mandate is computational, and it sits inside the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology, which has been designing, making and testing compounds for more than a decade — around half of the group’s published work reports molecules that were actually synthesised. That proximity is the point. A prediction gets checked by the people who made the molecule, and what the assay says can change the model the same week.

The October decisions gave that arrangement standing. What the University recognised is not a proposal but a way of working with results already behind it.