Category: 1. Why Choose?

Pharmacology helps people around the world to live healthier lives for longer and you can find it everywhere.

Pharmacology is there when you visit the dentist and have an injection to numb your mouth. Pharmacology is there when you take medicine for a headache. Pharmacologists created hay fever tablets, antibiotics, cancer treatments, and many other medicines that millions of us use each day.

Without pharmacologists we would not be able to:

• discover new medicines to help fight diseases
• make sure medicines are safe
• understand why some medicines work better for some people than others
• understand why some drugs cause addiction

Pharmacology is at the forefront of our fight to help ensure everyone has the opportunities to live healthy lives for longer. Pharmacologists around the world are currently:

• developing medicines to tackle new diseases
• identifying new treatments when old ones stop being effective
• discovering new medicines
• exploring how we can best use the medicines we already have
• tackling antibiotic resistance
• studying ageing to help us all live healthier lives for longer
• researching to make sure medicines are effective for everyone
• helping to make sure that everyone is prescribed the right medicines for them

Graduates with a degree in pharmacy/ pharmacology are often found behind the counters of a pharmacy, but this does not have to be the case. Many pharmacy/ pharmacology degree holders go on to pursue careers in hospitals, research, the community, quality management and even legal compliance.

1. Interact with humans: pharmacists can be found in many healthcare settings: inpatient, ambulatory and community centre settings. Pharmacists should be open to seeing customers at all times of the day and throughout the year. Their advice to patients matters and they help people get better.
2. Be part of major innovations in the pharmaceutical industry: scientists now know that genetic variation in genes can affect a body’s response to a drug. Specialists hope to someday sequence the entire human gene in each individual. Pharmacists and healthcare providers would then be able to use that information to choose the treatments suited best to an individual’s needs.
3. Job stability: human health is a great working field. Pharmacists are always in demand. There are always new drugs and treatments on the market and prescriptions to be handed out. This means that after graduation, you will find a job easily.

Pharmacology is an interdisciplinary field that explores many aspects of drug discovery, development and preclinical drug safety. It integrates knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines including chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology and physiology, providing a significant positive impact on human health. The scientific knowledge gained through pharmacologic studies provides a foundation for a number of medical treatments.

The discipline of pharmacology is distinct from the profession of pharmacy which addresses more of the formulation and dispensing of drugs for human use. Pharmacologists, however, focus on how drugs (both chemical and biologic molecules) interact with biological systems. Our bodies have the incredible ability to respond to chemical and biological molecules but at the same time these molecules have the incredible ability of influencing our biological responses. It is through the study of pharmacology we are able to identify novel molecular targets, develop unique chemical and biological molecules, and explore their preclinical impact.