Pharmacokinetics of Drugs

·
· Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology Book 110 · Springer Science & Business Media
eBook
537
Pages
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn more

About this eBook

The author of this Foreword has recently retired after spending 25 years in academia and 15 years in the pharmaceutical industry. Most of this time has been spent following and, hopefully in some instances, contributing to advancement of the discipline of pharmacokinetics. During the last 40 years, pharmacokinetics has grown from a fledgling in the 1950s to an adult in the 1990s. The late development of the discipline of pharmacokinetics, relative to other disciplines such as chemistry, bio chemistry, and pharmacology, probably stems both from general ignorance of the importance of the time course of concentration-effect relationships in drug therapy and from our technical inability to do anything about it had we been more enlightened. Just as the end of the historical dark ages had to await the beginning of the Carolingian revival, so the end of the pharma co kinetic dark age had to await the discovery of adequate analytical methods and also an intellectual leap of faith to accept that drug action is in some way dependent on receptor site occupancy, and therefore on drug con centration. The recent evolution of pharmacokinetics has occurred in three phases which may be identified as those of discovery, stabilization, and rationaliz ation. The discovery phase, which occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, esta blished the mathematics and concepts of "modern" pharmacokinetics and sought areas of application, ranging from model-independent methods, through compartment approaches, to complex physiological models.

Rate this eBook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Centre instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.