Pharmacology - Study of Drug Efficacy and Reaction

What is pharmacology and who is a pharmacologist? According to K K Pillai, head professor at the Department of Pharmacology, Jamia Hamdard, India, everyone is a pharmacologist in some way.

A person who advises a salt water gargle for curing a sore throat is one, as salt water is a solution of sodium chloride which serves as an antiseptic to cure throat infection.

Even animals are pharmacologists unto themselves, as most of them chew on leaves, etc., or lick their wounds to cure themselves. Zinc in a dog’s saliva is also an antiseptic. This is pharmacology in nature, says Pillai.

Pharmacology encompasses the fields of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary science, microbiology, virology and other sciences. It also includes drug discoveries with basic and applied research. Even physiotherapists should have pharmacology knowledge.

Coined from the Greek terms ‘pharmakon,’ meaning drug, and ‘logio,’ meaning study, this branch of medicine investigates drug actions on human or animal bodies and their reaction to the drugs. A knowledge of physical and chemical properties of a drug and of human physiology and anatomy are required for such studies.

Analyzing drug composition and properties, interactions, toxicology, therapy and medical applications and antipathogenic capabilities fall under its gambit. Pharmacology is comprised of pharmacodynamics, which studies chemical interaction with biological receptors, and pharmacokinetics, which studies absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of chemicals from the biological systems. Pharmacokinetics can also be used to establish dose response relationships in terms of efficacy and toxicity.

Pharmacology differs from pharmacy in the fact that the latter is a biomedical science dealing with preparation, dispensing, dosage, and the safe and effective use of medicines.

Data management solutions for pharmacology research

The study of drugs, their structure, properties and interaction with living systems is comprised of experimental approaches which give rise to complex and varied data types such as images, instrument output files and spreadsheet tables. The collection, analysis and reporting of this information is facilitated by BioBook, which is applicable from secondary plate-based in vitro assays through to late stage drug efficacy and behavior experiments.

BioBook, or e-workbook for biology, provides a compliant, yet flexible, solution to electronic study management in late-stage discovery. The underlying data management, report generation, experimental set-up and analysis provided by BioBook delivers improved productivity besides offering robust protection of valuable data.

A separate scientific discipline that synergizes the best practices of pharmacology, physiology and toxicology is safety pharmacology. The Safety Pharmacology Society, based in the United States, tries to promote knowledge, development, application, and training.

Safety Pharmacology studies the safe use of biologically active chemical entities by the identification, monitoring and characterization of potentially undesirable pharmacodynamic activities in nonclinical studies. The society serves Asian countries by providing required guidance regarding the safe usage of drugs.

Pharmacologists work with drug controllers of a nation and are responsible for license approvals for certain categories of drugs like vaccines. When drug companies want to launch a new drug, they conduct clinical trials on a sample population which is conducted by pharmacologists. Pharmacologists prepare drug databases required by physicians and along with IT professionals can even make drug information software.

Pharmacologists are in demand even in the knowledge process outsourcing industry. Post graduates in pharmacology find work in Intellectual Property Rights or IPR protection for providing technical expertise to patent attorneys. Pharmacologists in the pharmaceuticals sector prepare product profiles for physicians and product information literature found inside drug packets.