What is Clinical Pharmacology?

Clinical pharmacology is a discipline that studies drugs. It focuses on the laws of interaction between drugs and the human body. Its basic disciplines are clinical medicine and pharmacology, including toxic and side effects, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and so on. It is an important basic clinical medicine. Let's take a brief look at what clinical pharmacology is and what it covers.

Clinical pharmacology and clinical pharmacy are sister disciplines that emerged in the 1960s. They are branches of pharmacology and are cross-disciplines that study the laws of drug action in the human body and the process of drug interactions within the human body. The infiltration between marginal disciplines is particularly prominent among them, making it difficult for medical workers to distinguish. Although both belong to the field of pharmacy, they have different research purposes and focuses.

The main tasks of clinical pharmacology research in new drug evaluation include observing the efficacy and toxic and side effects of new drugs on humans, and studying the transport and transformation laws of new drugs in the human body. This research is conducted in advanced hospitals under the guidance of experienced clinical pharmacologists after approval by relevant national authorities. Long-term and in-depth clinical observation of the efficacy and toxic and side effects of new drugs is a routine task of clinical pharmacology research.

Regarding pharmacokinetic experiments, the main difference between clinical pharmacology and clinical pharmacy is generally considered to be the subjects of the experiments. The main subjects of clinical pharmacology experiments are normal healthy individuals, and pharmacokinetic data should be available for every drug marketed for systemic use (hundreds of drugs have undergone comprehensive pharmacokinetic analysis abroad, while China still lacks such data). In contrast, the subjects of clinical pharmacy experiments are patients, especially those with poor liver and kidney function. The tested drugs are mainly limited to a few drugs with low therapeutic index and nonlinear pharmacokinetic characteristics, where the elimination constant in the body is related to the dose.