PHM 487- Current Topics in Pharmacology

Description

Therapeutic drugs for human or veterinary clinical medicine that have generated significant attention in the non scientific news media. Reasons for societal attention, therapeutic breakthroughs, therapeutic needs, drug marketing, and drug regulatory policies.

Topics

Topics in past offerings of the course have included:

• The use of hormone replacement in postmenopausal women
• Antibodies as clinically useful drugs
• Performance enhancing drugs: steroids through Adderall
• Vioxx & Celebrex: How to mishandle or survive a potential drug recall
• Thalidomide: A banished drug returns
• Drug shortages: Causes and outcomes
• Rogaine & Viagra: Drugs with different uses than originally intended
• Delalutin: Preventing Miscarriage - How much is it worth?
• SSRIs: Do antidepressant drugs cause suicide?
• Electronic cigarettes: a new way to deliver nicotine

Pre-requisites

Approval of department required.

Recommended Textbooks

None

Instructor(s)

Dr. Peter Cobbett received his BS and PhD degrees from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His research interests have ranged from muscles of parasitic worms, to physiology of neurons and glia in mammalian brains, and most recently, to neurons derived from non-neuronal somatic cells.