General provisions

Equivalent to 3FB054 or 3FB600.

Entry requirements

Followed earlier courses within the programme.

Learning outcomes

After having completed the course, the student should be able to:

• apply statistical methods used within the field of pharmaceutical sciences,
• interpret statistical data and results,
• describe how basic pharmacokinetic processes, as absorption, distribution and elimination, are defined, expressed, calculated, affected, and how these processes in combination determine drug disposition in the organism over time,
• explain how pharmacokinetics together with pharmacodynamics determine the effect intensity and effect duration of a drug,
• establish dosing regimens for drugs based on their pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic characteristics, use given dosing regimens for calculation of concentrations, and describe how doses should be adjusted due to variability in pharmacokinetic parameters,
• identify the most common types of drug interactions, describe the underlying mechanisms, and account for the consequences of the interactions,
• apply pharmacokinetic principles to explain individual variation in drug disposition, and account for the consequences of this.

Content

This is a basic course in pharmacokinetics, i.e. about the uptake and disposition of drugs in the body, and in pharmacodynamics, i.e. the description of drug effects with special focus on the time course of the effect(s).

The first week of the course deals with descriptive statistics, regression analysis, correlations and hypothesis testing.

The pharmacokinetics part of the course deals with absorption, plasma protein binding, tissue distribution and elimination of drugs by liver and kidneys and how these processes determine the overall disposition of the drug in the organism. In addition, the relationships between dose and plasma concentration and of plasma concentration and effect are described, both for a given drug and its metabolites. The course also deals with calculation and evaluation of mathematical parameters that describe pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic processes, both regarding single dose and repeated dose administration. Finally, it describes the theoretical basis for clinical drug dosing, reasons for and rational handling of inter-individual variation in drug disposition as well as drug-drug interactions.

Instruction

Teaching is provided through lectures, seminars, workshops (both teacher-supervised and independent), calculation exercises and computer laboratory sessions. Computer laboratory sessions and certain seminars are compulsory.

Assessment

Individual, written examination is arranged at the end of the statistics part and of the pharmacokinetics part of the course.

In order to pass the course, the student must have completed all compulsory exercises and the written examinations.If there are special reasons for doing so, an examiner may make an exception from the method of assessment indicated and allow a student to be assessed by another method. An example of special reasons might be a certificate regarding special pedagogical support from the University's disability coordinator.