Course overview
Societies across the world are looking to combat a greater range of human diseases but at the same time contain spiralling healthcare costs. This, together with global competition and increasing regulatory standards, puts enormous pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to discover and develop a greater number of therapeutic candidates even faster and cheaper than ever before.
This course develops the key themes in the drug discovery and development pipeline and highlights the multi-disciplinary nature of the research and development process. Topics include: Target identification and validation, Hit discovery, Hit-to-lead optimisation, pre-clinical and clinical testing, regulatory and manufacturing considerations.
Course learning outcomes
- Demonstrate an awareness of the current approaches to global drug discovery and their advantages and limitations.
- Demonstrate an understanding of the steps involved in the drug discovery and design process
- Demonstrate an awareness of the important contributions the different discipline areas make to the drug discovery and development process.
- Critically analyse biological pathways for their potential as drug targets for a given disease.
- Demonstrate the ability to use evidence-based approaches to guide decision making during the drug discovery and development process.
- Demonstrate an understanding of the importance of strict quality control and regulation in the drug development process, and an awareness of issues associated with the manufacturing of medicines such as good manufacturing practice.
- Critically analyse and integrate information from the scientific literature.
- Present to an audience in summary the critical evaluation of the scientific literature and experimental data