Pharmacology

Pharmacology can be broadly defined as the study of how chemical agents affect living processes. These chemical agents include natural substances, such as hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors, and local autocrine factors, as well as drugs and toxic agents in the environment. Thus, by definition, pharmacology is a very broad-based discipline. Indeed, the Department of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine embraces this broad definition.

The breadth of our scientific environment is manifest by faculty who study the fate of drugs once ingested and the variability of drug response in varying patient populations, pharmacokinetics, as well as faculty who study the mechanisms by which drugs as well as endogenous agents work, pharmacodynamics, with the intention that detailed molecular insights concerning the mechanism of action of endogenous hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors or autocoids ultimately will lead to the discovery of novel drug targets for therapeutic intervention in diseases where distal steps in signal transduction.