Pharmaceutics is an important field in pharmacy with an important educational and research place at different levels of education including PhD General, and PhD. The aim of pharmaceutics as a science is to transform drugs of natural or synthetic origin into pharmaceutical products (various drug forms or drug-transferring systems) and enable them to send drugs to the effective locations at the suitable time and for a favorable period, as well as to make drugs acceptable to the patients. Among such systems one may note to the various drug forms, such as tablets, capsules, syrups, and/or more complex systems including Nano-particles, aimed systems, responsive systems, osmotic pumps, implanting systems, cutaneous patches, and recently, the micro-chips.
The process of preparing a pharmaceutical product begins with preliminary studies, or in other words, pre-formulation work on the primary medicinal materials. In such studies, different physical and chemical properties of the materials are studied. Then, with using side-materials, or the continuation of the process, a product with favorable efficiency and applications are produced, which is called “formulation”.
Conducting different physic-chemical and/or microbiological studies and tests can approve the efficiency of a product in vivo. Later, through prescribing the product to the volunteers and/or animals, the efficiency of the product is assessed which would help in assessing the various pharmaceutical parameters of the product (bio-studies, and pharmaceutical ones). Therefore, pharmaceutics involves important branches including formulation, and providing different drug forms, physical pharmacy, physic-chemical controls, and microbial and bio-pharmacy controls, all being taught as theoretical and practical courses.
Pharmaceutics has been the bases of producing different drug products, and with utilizing the knowledge resulted from pharmaceutics, the various drug products (compounds) can be made in the pharmacy, or factory. Bearing in mind the important role the pharmacists play, one of the vital roles of pharmaceutics is the training of efficient, scientific experts who can render their services in this important industry.
Therefore, the students of pharmacy have to learn pharmaceutics as part of their training and in-service training. In general, it can be said that the pharmacists who are familiar with pharmaceutics, can well utilize their knowledge at drugstores, drug industry, and the research centers.
It has been more than 20 years in Iran spent on the training of the assistants at PhD level in Pharmaceutics. Presently, there is no need to send the students abroad for training in the field. It has been more than 12 years at the SBMU School of Pharmacy to admit and train students at PhD level in Pharmaceutics; 21 have been graduated, and 26 are under training courses.
The fields of interest in pharmaceutics at the PhD level at the Department of Pharmaceutics of the SBMU School of Pharmacy include the following:
-Designing drug transmission networks based on the Nano-technology and micro-technology including liposomes, Nano-spheres, micro-spheres, dendrimers, Nano-tubes, as well as designing bio-destroyable, bio-adhesive, insitu-forming and pre-drugs networks in order to perform peptide-protein drug transmission, gene delivery, organizing and improving pharma-kinetics, and drug effectiveness.;
- Bettering the dermal drug transmission and dermal modeling;
- Conducting preclinical pharmaceutical studies, and investigating about the drug ingestion, and fate in the body;
- Doing drug microbial control and physic-chemical analyses based on the new methods;
- Performing particle engineering;
A major part of the above research protocols are performed at the different labs at the department, and in some cases, the labs and facilities in other departments and labs are used.
It is worthy of mentioning that the Department of Pharmaceutics is willing to admit new PhD and MSc course-based programs;
Those graduated in pharmaceutics at the department will be hired as the academic staff members at various universities, drug industry, and also as the directors and managers of different sections, research circles, and finally, at the private sector. Therefore, it can be said that the science of pharmaceutics and its related courses can absorb a lot of interested parties as it is an applied field with a lot of interest. It should also be noted that the specialists in pharmaceutics play a major role in cosmetics-health industry, and providing formulations for various cosmetics products.
The dissertations submitted to the department cover different aspects of various drug formulation forms, from Nano-particles, Nano-technology, cosmetics formulations, analyses and control of physic-chemical materials and drugs, to medicinal microbiology, bio-pharmacy, and pharmaco-kinetics.
The department contact info:
E-mail: a.haeri@sbmu.ac.ir