Main description:

Pharmacology in Drug Discovery: Understanding Drug Response is designed for all students, recent graduates, and new researchers in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries who need to interpret change in physiology induced by a chemical substance. Physiological systems customize chemical signal input to their own needs; therefore the same drug can have different effects in different physiological systems. The field of pharmacology is unique in that it furnishes the tools to analyze these different behaviors and traces them to their root cause. This enables predictions of drug behavior to be made in all systems, an invaluable tool for drug discovery because almost all drugs are developed in test systems far removed from the therapeutic one.
This valuable resource provides simple explanations of the ways in which biological systems use basic biochemical mechanisms to produce fine chemical control of physiology, allowing for more informed predictions of drug effects in all systems and forming the basis of the drug-discovery process. Chapters follow a logical progression on how to characterize the pharmacology of any given molecule, and include important terminology, chapter summaries, references, and review questions to aid the reader in understanding and retention of the material.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Pharmacology: The Chemical Control of Physiology

Chapter 2: Drug Affinity and Efficacy

Chapter 3: Predicting Agonist Effect

Chapter 4: Drug Antagonism: Orthosteric Drug Effects

Chapter 5: Allosteric Drug Effects

Chapter 6: Enzymes as Drug Targets

Chapter 7: Pharmacokinetics I: Permeation and Metabolism

Chapter 8: Pharmacokinetics II: Distribution and Multiple Dosing

Chapter 9: In Vivo Pharmacology

Chapter 10: Safety Pharmacology

Chapter 11: Answers to Chapter Questions

Chapter 12: Derivations and Proofs