What are the Pharmaceutical Sciences?
The Pharmaceutical Sciences...
- combine an integrated knowledge of chemistry, biology, mathematics and computer sciences with human anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, disease and therapeutics to optimize patient drug therapy!
- focus on the design, development and rational use of medications for the treatment and prevention of disease
- contribute to the drug development and research process in the development of new medications
The Pharmaceutical Sciences seek to provide answers to:
- What dosage form or drug delivery system should be used?
- How much of a dose should be administered?
- How frequently should the dose be administered?
- Will the medication interact with other drugs?
- Should the dose be individualized based on age, body weight and composition, lifestyle factors, medical history, other diseases, and gene expression?
Areas of interest in the Pharmaceutical Sciences include:
- the physical chemistry of pharmaceutical systems, which is concerned with the development and optimization of the physical/chemical properties of traditional and novel drug delivery systems;
- biopharmaceutics, which encompasses the study of the relationship between the nature and intensity of biologic effects of drugs and various dosage form formulation factors;
- pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, which are the sciences of the quantitative analyses of drug concentrations and therapeutic effects, respectively, in the human body;
- clinical pharmacokinetics and clinical pharmacodynamics, which are concerned with the application of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics to the safe and effective therapeutic management of individual patients;
- pharmacogenomics and bioinformatics, which are new, emerging scientific disciplines concerned with (1) how an individual's genotype governs his/her drug concentrations and therapeutic response; and (2) how drugs may alter a person's gene expression; and
- pharmacometrics, which is a new field that fuses pharmacology, computer sciences, mathematics and statistics to analyze diverse data in large populations of diverse patients.
|
