Pharmacology is the science of drugs and medications, including a substance's origin, composition, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, therapeutic use, and toxicology. More specifically, it is the study of the interactions that occur between a living organism and chemicals that affect normal or abnormal biochemical function. If substances have medicinal properties, they are considered pharmaceuticals.
Pharmacotherapy, also known as pharmacological therapy or drug therapy, is defined as medical treatment that utilizes one or more pharmaceutical drugs to improve ongoing symptoms, treat the underlying condition, or act as a prevention for other diseases (prophylaxis).
Drug delivery refers to approaches, formulations, manufacturing techniques, storage systems, and technologies involved in transporting a pharmaceutical compound to its target site to achieve a desired therapeutic effect. Principles related to drug preparation, route of administration, site-specific targeting, metabolism, and toxicity are used to optimize efficacy and safety, and to improve patient convenience and compliance. Drug delivery is aimed at altering a drug's pharmacokinetics and specificity by formulating it with different excipients, drug carriers, and medical devices. There is additional emphasis on increasing the bioavailability and duration of action of a drug to improve therapeutic outcomes. Some research has also been focused on improving safety for the person administering the medication. For example, several types of microneedle patches have been developed for administering vaccines and other medications to reduce the risk of needlestick injury.
Modified-release dosage is a mechanism that delivers a drug with a delay after its administration or for a prolonged period of time or to a specific target in the body.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in applications throughout industry and academia. Similar to electricity or computers, AI serves as a general-purpose technology that has numerous applications. Its applications span language translation, image recognition, decision-making, credit scoring, e-commerce and various other domains. AI which accommodates such technologies as machines being equipped perceive, understand, act and learning a scientific discipline.
Niosomes are vesicles composed of non-ionic surfactants, incorporating cholesterol as an excipient. Niosomes are utilized for drug delivery to specific sites to achieve desired therapeutic effects. Structurally, niosomes are similar to liposomes as both consist of a lipid bilayer. However, niosomes are more stable than liposomes during formation processes and storage. Niosomes trap hydrophilic and lipophilic drugs, either in an aqueous compartment or in a vesicular membrane compartment composed of lipid material.
Thin-film drug delivery uses a dissolving film or oral drug strip to administer drugs via absorption in the mouth and/or via the small intestines (enterically). A film is prepared using hydrophilic polymers that rapidly dissolves on the tongue or buccal cavity, delivering the drug to the systemic circulation via dissolution when contact with liquid is made.
Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are nanoparticles composed of lipids. They are a novel pharmaceutical drug delivery system, and a novel pharmaceutical formulation. LNPs as a drug delivery vehicle were first approved in 2018 for the siRNA drug Onpattro. LNPs became more widely known in late 2020, as some COVID-19 vaccines that use RNA vaccine technology coat the fragile mRNA strands with PEGylated lipid nanoparticles as their delivery vehicle.
OS Fund is an American venture capital fund that invests in early-stage science and technology companies.
Andreas Bernkop-Schnürch is an Austrian scientist and entrepreneur, who is Head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology in the Institute of Pharmacy at the University of Innsbruck.
Molecular Operating Environment (MOE) is a drug discovery software platform that integrates visualization, modeling and simulations, as well as methodology development, in one package. MOE scientific applications are used by biologists, medicinal chemists and computational chemists in pharmaceutical, biotechnology and academic research. MOE runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Main application areas in MOE include structure-based design, fragment-based design, ligand-based design, pharmacophore discovery, medicinal chemistry applications, biologics applications, structural biology and bioinformatics, protein and antibody modeling, molecular modeling and simulations, virtual screening, cheminformatics & QSAR. The Scientific Vector Language (SVL) is the built-in command, scripting and application development language of MOE.
Poisoning is the harmful effect which occurs when toxic substances are introduced into the body. The term "poisoning" is a derivative of poison, a term describing any chemical substance that may harm or kill a living organism upon ingestion. Poisoning can be brought on by swallowing, inhaling, injecting or absorbing toxins through the skin. Toxicology is the practice and study of symptoms, mechanisms, diagnoses, and treatments correlated to poisoning.
Artificial intelligence in healthcare is the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to copy human cognition in the analysis, presentation, and understanding of complex medical and health care data. It can also augment and exceed human capabilities by providing faster or new ways to diagnose, treat, or prevent disease. Using AI in healthcare has the potential improve predicting, diagnosing and treating diseases. Through machine learning algorithms and deep learning, AI can analyse large sets of clinical data and electronic health records and can help to diagnose the disease more quickly and precisely.
Insilico Medicine is a biotechnology company based in Pak Shek Kok, Hong Kong in Hong Kong Science Park near the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in New York, at The Cure by Deerfield. The company combines genomics, big data analysis, and deep learning for in silico drug discovery.
Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.
Merative L.P., formerly IBM Watson Health, is an American medical technology company that provides products and services that help clients facilitate medical research, clinical research, real world evidence, and healthcare services, through the use of artificial intelligence, data analytics, cloud computing, and other advanced information technology. Merative is owned by Francisco Partners, an American private equity firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. In 2022, IBM divested and spun-off their Watson Health division into Merative. As of 2023, it remains a standalone company headquartered in Ann Arbor with innovation centers in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai.
Abdul Waseh Basit is a professor of pharmaceutics at University College London, and founder of two pharmaceutical biotechnology companies spinning out of UCL. Basit is interested in particular in oral drug delivery and pharmaceutical three-dimensional (3D) printing.
The MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health is a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and health sciences, including disease detection, drug discovery, and the development of medical devices. The MIT Jameel Clinic also supports the commercialization of solutions through grant funding, and has partnered with pharmaceutical companies, like Takeda and Sanofi, and philanthropies, like Community Jameel and Wellcome Trust, to forge collaborations between research and development functions and MIT researchers.
Kishor M. Wasan is a Canadian pharmacologist, pharmacist and professor. He was the dean of the University of Saskatchewan's College of Pharmacy and Nutrition from 2014 to 2019 and associate dean of research and graduate studies at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC) from 2011 to 2014. Previously at UBC, he was chair of pharmaceutics and national director of the Canadian Summer Student Research Program after first joining the faculty in 1995. Wasan's research focuses on lipid-based drug delivery and the interaction between lipoprotein and pharmaceuticals. He has published more than 550 peer-reviewed articles and abstracts. He is a founding member and co-director of UBC's Neglected Global Diseases Initiative.
Vitaliy Khutoryanskiy FRSC FAPS is a British and Kazakhstani scientist, a Professor of Formulation Science and a Royal Society Industry Fellow at the University of Reading. His research focuses on polymers, biomaterials, nanomaterials, drug delivery, and pharmaceutical sciences. Khutoryanskiy has published over 200 original research articles, book chapters, and reviews. His publications have attracted > 12000 citations and his current h-index is 53. He received several prestigious awards in recognition for his research in polymers, colloids and drug delivery as well as for contributions to research peer-review and mentoring of early career researchers. He holds several honorary professorship titles from different universities.
