Applied Pharmacology

The goal of the course is to acquire the knowledge required to understand the experimental approaches used in basic and clinical pharmacology research. Theorical and practical aspects of pharmacological research will be tasked. The Course takes the move from the knowledge already acquired by the student in order to understand how to study the activity of a drug and which criteria are typically followed in the development of a new biologically active molecule. The Course will provide a practical approach to pharmacology with the goal of learning how to design and validate experimental protocol and present the results obtained rather than extensively survey the pharmacological protocols available. The discussion of specific topics will be implemented through the reading and presentation of scientific papers.

The student will learn of the critical steps to attend a Pharmacological Research laboratory. He/she will learn how to examine the state of the art to develop a specific research activity. He/she will learn the general features related to the different experimental models (acellular, cellular, isolated and in vivo organs) and to clinical studies. He/she will learn how to critically examine the results of a scientific experiment and will be given examples of the different types of experimental models