PHAC 5405

Pharmacology employs a wide variety of experimental approaches to study drug action at the molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, and organism levels. This course describes the techniques used to develop safe and effective compounds and biologics with the appropriate pharmacokinetics properties for the treatment of a wide array of diseases. Students will first receive training in experimental design. This will be followed by a description of how drug targets have been identified for approved therapeutics. Students will then be introduced to the use of human stem cells and animal disease models for drug screening. Next, the students will receive training in drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination. Students will then learn about recent innovations in biologically based therapeutics and nanomedicine. Lastly, they will be taught how bioinformatics can be used to identify new drug targets and develop genetically based models to predict the human safety and efficacy of therapeutics that activate or inhibit them.