There's synthetic chemistry or pharmacology, both will require graduate level work.
As far as I know pharmacists only dispense drugs, they don't work on developing new ones, may vary from country to country though.
In the USA, pharmacists are heavily trained in undergrad science and then once in pharmacy school, more intensive fundamentals are taught. Things like pKa will be used again in pharmacy school to look at a drug and determine its solulability, this is just one example.
Pharmacists are capable of doing so much with a pharmD, not just counting by 5's in walgreens/cvs. There are specialty pharmacists that work in pain management, oncology, organ transplant, pharmacoeconomics (econ of using drug a or drug b, etc), pharmacoinformatics (computational approaches for a vast array of applications), dea, fda, and many others.
Pharmacists can run clinical trials, conduct research on new drugs at university or pharmaceutical company (research is team driven these days), work with regulatory agencies, work with developing drug leaflets that explain the details of the drug.
Importantly, for patient care, pharmacists are becoming more involved with MTMS (Medication Therapy Management Services) to provide better outcomes with fewer drug misadventures for people with multiple disease states consuming numerous drugs.
They also do stand in the white coat and count by 5's, but the entire industry is changing; they even give flu and pneumo immunizations now.
For the OP, drug discovery is team focused these days with synthetic organic chemists developing new molecules, that the molecular biologist, biochemists, and physiologists will all work with. They do the research, if all goes well, once the drug reaches a mature state, clinical trials ensue to establish toxicity and pharmacokinetics in an ever growing population of humans. Thus, one can choose many backgrounds to work in drug discovery. I should also add, mathematicians and statisticians play an integral part as well.
