Postgraduate Medicine and Therapeutics 2019-2020

This course is designed to provide or revise the basic skills you will require for your MSc. The course will revise basic laboratory skills and techniques and advance these to a level required to undertake graduate practical classes and projects by developing hands-on experience, competence and confidence in key laboratory skills. 

The course focuses on the molecular mechanisms of drug action and how cutting edge research can advance current therapeutic approaches to disease.   The utility of molecular pharmacology will be highlighted in the context of current and future drug discovery for cardiovascular, neurological and metabolic diseases and cancer. 

This course will describe and review the use of medicinal compounds in man together with methods to assess and describe efficacy and toxicity. A number of exemplar disease areas and at risk populations will be selected and the drugs used to treat these conditions and populations discussed and explained. The importance of understand drug mechanisms of action and associated risk as well as benefit will be emphasised in a clinical setting. The course will consider both drugs in current use and those in development.

This course provides advanced level learning in drug metabolism, discovery and development.  It includes the importance of drug transporters in the drug discovery process, regulatory issues and  molecular toxicology and pharmacology at an advanced level. Mechanisms of drug-induced and oxidative stress and immunopharmacology are described. External experts are invited to provide their unique expertise on a range of topics which can include toxicopathology, immunotoxicology, risk assessment and an industrial perspective on the drug discovery process.

This course reviews a range of essential methodologies that are currently used in medical research from molecular technologies to human studies.  Experts in the various techniques will describe the fundamentals of the methodology and show how they can be applied.

Pharmacokinetics describe “what the body does to a drug” and thus is a central feature of applied pharmacology. The course will develop an understanding of the role that pharmacokinetics play in all aspects of drug administration, distribution, metabolism and excretion and how these effects can be modelled and predicted graphically and mathematically. Such modelling is a fundament of therapeutic regimen design, drug development, clinical pharmacology and drug safety and will be considered within all of these contexts providing a broad and relevant appreciation of the importance of pharmacokinetics to the pharmacologist

This course will provide you with an introduction to evidence-based medicine. It will also include a description of the elements of pharmaceutical research as well as of the drug development process.

The course will provide an understanding of the role of governance and regulatory requirements for clinical research and will be invaluable to researchers whether scientists or medics.