Postgraduate handbook 2004
Pharmacy

Research profile

Leading-edge research is conducted within and collaboratively between the faculty's four departments. The faculty enjoys close links with researchers in other faculties of the university - notably Medicine and Science - as well as other Australian and international universities, and the national and international pharmaceutical industry and profession. The faculty's research output is also sustained and strengthened by its longstanding commitment to postgraduate training.

The faculty benchmarks its research effort against the best pharmacy schools in the United States and the United Kingdom. It measures the quality of its research output in terms of the standing of its researchers, the level of funding attracted, publications in refereed scholarly journals, patent applications lodged, and the calibre of its research graduates. High-quality research facilities are available within all departments for students to undertake graduate work in experimental and theoretical areas of the pharmaceutical sciences.

Areas of research include:

• Pharmaceutics - drug delivery and formulation science: utilisation of the transdermal route for the delivery of drugs, lipid-based formulation design, intestinal lymphatic transport of drugs, factors affecting the absorption of drugs across the intestinal mucosa, respiratory drug delivery, physicochemical and analytical characterisations of new drug candidates, stability and characterisation of protein drugs, absorption of protein drugs after subcutaneous administration, contributions of intestinal and hepatic metabolism to the bioavailability of drugs, powder mixing and content uniformity studies.
• Medicinal Chemistry - drug design and development (supported by contributions in the fields of: computer-aided molecular design and computational chemistry, NMR spectroscopy, protein chemistry and molecular biology; syntheses and characterisation of bioactive molecules, x-ray crystallography, and mass spectrometry.
• Pharmaceutical Biology and Pharmacology - drug addiction pharmacology, prostate research group, neurotransmitter and second messenger systems, and novel therapies using molecular biology approaches. A diversity of projects is available in each of these research areas using the techniques of in-vivo and in-vitro pharmacology, molecular pharmacology, biochemistry and physiology.
• Pharmacy Practice - quality use of medicines, pharmaceutical education research, epidemiology and health economics, impact of drug-related morbidity, practice models, wound management, and clinical pharmacokinetics.

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