Tag: Pharmacology Miniseries

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Quiz: Do You Know Pharmacology Facts?

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This is the final post in our miniseries on pharmacology. Check out the others: “What Is Pharmacology?“, “What Happens to Medicine In Your Body?“, and “How Do Medicines Work?“
Various pills spilling out of an orange bottle onto a blue background. A quiz question reads: What is pharmacology? Three blank answer options are below.
Credit: NIGMS.

Pharmacologists research how the body acts on medicines (e.g., absorption, excretion) and how medicines act in the body, as well as how these effects vary from person to person. NIGMS-funded pharmacology researchers are:

  • Conducting research to design medicines with fewer side effects
  • Exploring how genes cause people to respond differently to medicines
  • Developing new methods and molecular targets for drug discovery
  • Discovering medicines based on natural products
  • Understanding how medicines act using computers
  • Monitoring brain function under anesthesia to develop safer anesthetic medicines that reduce side effects
  • Creating artificial tissue to heal muscles after traumatic injuries
  • Investigating how to treat patients with sepsis
  • Measuring tissue damage from burns to help improve treatment options
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How Do Medicines Work?

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A person in a white lab coat and blue gloves touching a screen with a holographic human body and data readouts.
Credit: iStock.

What we put into our bodies can affect how they function and what they do. For example, a sugary snack will probably make you feel differently than a high-protein meal. Similarly, different medicines elicit different responses in your body, and pharmacologists try to fine-tune each medicine to balance the desired (on-target) with the undesired (off-target) effects—a branch of pharmacology called pharmacodynamics.

Most medicines work by binding to a molecular target, usually proteins like receptors or enzymes, and either blocking or supporting its activity, which results in their therapeutic effects.

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What Happens to Medicine in Your Body?

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Cutaway diagram of the human body (head, arms, and torso) showing the blood (arteries in red and veins in blue) and internal organs. Drug delivery is shown by intravenous drip with a blue arrow into the arm, medicine tablet with a black arrow into the mouth, and inhaler with a blue arrow through the mouth into both lungs. The life of the drug in the body is shown by black arrows from mouth to stomach, from stomach to liver, from liver to heart, from blood to kidney, and from liver to intestines.
Medicines administered orally, by inhaler, and intravenously enter the stomach, lungs, and veins, respectively. They’re absorbed, then circulate throughout the body in the blood, are processed by the liver, and excreted by the kidneys and intestines. Credit: NIGMS.

Have you ever wondered what happens inside your body when you take a medicine? An area of pharmacology called pharmacokinetics is the study of precisely that. Here, we follow a medicine as it enters the body, finds its therapeutic target (also called the active site), and then eventually leaves the body.

To begin, a person takes or is given a dose of medicine by a particular route of administration, such as by mouth (oral); through the skin (topical), mucous membranes
(nasal), or lungs (inhaled); or through a needle into a muscle (intramuscular) or into a vein (intravenous). Sometimes medicines can be administered right where they’re needed, like a topical antibiotic ointment on a scrape, but most medicines need to enter the blood to reach their therapeutic target and be effective. Those are the ones we’ll continue following, using the common pharmacokinetic acronym ADME:

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What Is Pharmacology?

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A collage of different cartoon images showing scientists working across a spectrum of basic science, chemistry, biology, research, genetics, and medicine, illustrated by images of an EKG readout, test tubes and a pipette, a syringe and medicine bottle, a chemical structure, a microscope, a pill bottle and pill, a data chart, a hospital, a DNA strand, and a human silhouette.
Credit: iStock.

Pharmacology is the study of how molecules, such as medicines, interact with the body. Scientists who study pharmacology are called pharmacologists, and they explore the chemical properties, biological effects, and therapeutic uses of medicines and other molecules. Their work can be broken down into two main areas:

  • Pharmacokinetics is the study of how the body acts on a medicine, including its processes of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME).
  • Pharmacodynamics is the study of how a medicine acts in the body—both on its intended target and throughout all the organs and tissues in the body.
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