Pharmacology sounds awesome! But how r third year subject? R they interesting too? Anyone done them?
This semester I did Drugs in Biomedical Experiments and Drugs: Discovery to Market, which are the two compulsory subjects for the Pharmacology major.
The first one is a practical subject and it requires very, very little time for revision. There is a 3 hour prac and 2 workshops each week. The workshops usually introduce you to the prac and give a bit of foundation knowledge. There are assessments for four of the pracs (30%) and for each prac you have to do a write-up in your lab book (10%).
You're strongly encouraged to do the whole write-up during the actual practical session - like they actually get annoyed if you do stuff out of class and say the can always tell who does it since they've been marking lab books for about 20 years, so again there's not a whole lot you need to do for that out of class.
It's an application based subject and most (if not all) of the learning is done during the actual prac. Each prac is pretty much like solving a problem or finding an answer to a question - which is why it was so much better than your regular chemistry and biology pracs from first year. You go in with a general idea of what might happen, but your thoughts will continuously be challenged and it's actually pretty fun putting forward explanations for all your results. Pracs pretty much consist of organ baths and high-throughput assay systems, and you'll test certain drugs, measure responses and draw conclusions. The very last prac actually involves you being administered a drug or a placebo (you don't know which one you get) and by measuring your signs before and after administration, you need to figure out which drug you were given (of course taking the drug is entirely optional).
But that's basically it, you'll be given a drug you don't know much about, and you'll do a series of tests to try and figure out, for example if the drug is an agonist (full or partial), antagonist (irreversible/reversible competitive/allosteric) or even if it's toxic/safe to use. Alternatively, you'll be given a tissue you don't know much about, and then by using known agonists and antagonists of certain receptors, you'll be expected to figure out what sort of receptors are present on the tissue. It sounds simple enough, but a lot of things occur that you don't expect to occur, and you need to try and figure out why that happens - and you'll do that sometimes by tweaking the experimental procedure.
You're expected to develop a number of practical and critical thinking skills and be able to use them in largely unfamiliar situations. As a result, for the MST and exam, you don't need to spend much time revising - and the coordinators stress this to you themselves.
I'll write a proper subject review on it going into more detail soon, but this subject required about 1-2 hours commitment outside of class per week, and exam revision required about 5 hours in total for most people I know, and it was so much more enjoyable that I thought it would be.
The other subject is the theory based one, and it was also run quite well. This subject, as the name suggests, teaches you about how companies/organisations actually discover drugs and the journey many of them take until they get onto the market. You learn about different types of receptors and natural interactions in the body and how we can develop drugs to elicit desirable outcomes while minimising adverse effects.
You also learn about different classes of drugs we can use and the advantages/disadvantages associated with them. Of course there's a lecture on each phase of the clinical trial and you learn about how and why they're conducted. There are also a series of lectures building on your pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic knowledge from last year - which also ties in with designing drugs with certain properties. All in all it's pretty well put together subjects - especially when looking back on it now.
Home
Help
Search
Login
