Pharmaceutical Science: Drug Discovery and Formulation

Pharmaceutical science is an amalgamation of several interdisciplinary fields that are concerned with the design, discovery, action and disposition of drugs. It is a broad field with several branches, such as pharmacology, pharmaceutics, pharmacognosy and pharmaceutical chemistry. Drug discovery and drug formulation are two important areas of pharmaceutical science that are constantly evolving. Natural products or extracts, and small synthetic molecules are subject to screening in cells or whole organisms for identifying substances with therapeutic effect. Due to the advent of high throughput screening and sequencing of the human genome, large compounds libraries are now screened against biological targets. Hits that are shown to be disease-modifying are then tested in cells and in animals to determine their efficacy. In pharmaceutical formulation, different chemical substances and the active drug are combined to create the final medicinal product, which is both stable and acceptable. To achieve this, factors such as polymorphism, article size, solubility and pH are considered. The drug form developed also depends on the route of administration, such as capsules, pills and tablets. This book traces the progress of pharmaceutical science and highlights some of its key principles and practices. It discusses the fundamentals as well as modern approaches of drug discovery and drug formulation. The extensive content of this book provides the readers with a thorough understanding of the subject.