Pharmacology PhD

Overview

The department is among the most highly rated for research in the United Kingdom and hosts the MRC funded Centre for Drug Safety Science and the Wolfson Centre for Personalized Medicine.

We have state-of-the-art research facilities and funding from sources including MRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, NIHR, Wolfson Foundation and the EU.

Our focus is on research that is directed towards understanding disease processes, defining therapeutic strategies for intervention, and the scientific basis of drug safety. The ultimate aim of this research is to translate laboratory findings into the clinic for the benefit of patients, the public and the healthcare system.

Our research specifically focuses on the following areas:

• Drug Safety Science - We undertake fundamental clinical and basic research into the causes, characteristics and consequences of adverse drug reactions to improve the benefit-risk ratio of current and new medicines
• Personalized Medicine - We aim to identify the specific differences which cause individuals to respond to drugs differently
• Immuno-pharmacology - We undertake basic and clinical research to characterize drug interactions with immune cells and identify novel drug targets

Research themes

Our research themes include:

• Basic studies which define the biological effects of therapeutics in humans
• Non-human or non-clinical studies conducted with the intent to advance therapies to the clinic or develop principles for application of therapeutics to human disease
• Investigations in humans which define the biology of disease and provide the scientific foundation for the development of new or improved therapies for human disease
• Any clinical trial of a therapy that was initiated based on the above
• The biology-chemistry “bridge”.