Quantitative Pharmacology

At the end of the course, students should be able to: 1. explain the most commonly used quantitative models in pharmacology; and 2. use biostatistics in the design, collection, summarisation, analysis and interpretation of data in pharmacology experiments.

Introduction: Drug – receptor interaction; affinity and [intrinsic activity; occupancy theory; Rate Theory; Drug receptor interactions; law of mass action, enzyme-substrate interaction. dose- response relationship – Graphical and Derivation of receptor affinity PD2; Competitive Antagonism. The Gaddum-Schild Equation for Affinity constant of competitive antagonists; Non-competitive antagonism, Partial agonist; Competitive non-competitive antagonism. Pharmacodynamic prediction from pharmacokinetic data (one compartment model). Receptor desensitisation, Mechanisms of Post-receptor transduction. Introduction to Biostatistics, Normal distribution, Mean probit transformation, standard Deviation and standard Error. T-tests paired and unpaired, chi- square Test, Analysis of variance, Poisson Distribution. Physiology and Pharmacology courses are the minor and major courses in a BSc Pharmacology programme worldwide. Students must therefore be well grounded in them upon graduation to be able to pursue a successful career. Physiology provides the theoretical basis of normal body function while pharmacology explains how drugs and chemicals exert correction in situations of altered physiology. These two courses transverse all organs/systems of the human body and span 200 to 400 Levels of the BSc Pharmacology programme.