Ph.D in Pharmaceutics

Drug development has become increasingly complex, time consuming and expensive. As a result there is an increased focus on making clinically established drugs perform better therapeutically in terms of efficacy, safety and improved patient compliance by designing novel and patentable technologies or delivery systems. This has led to a paradigm shift in drug delivery technologies from conventional dosage forms to controlled release and sophisticated delivery systems. These systems are based on the concepts of biopharmaceutics and pharmacokinetic driven by pharmacodynamic activity and therapeutic needs. The emergence of the Biopharmaceutic Classification System (BCS) based on the two tenets of absorption namely solubility and permeability has further simplified drug development program form a regulatory perspective. About 20 drugs, which are not only of clinical significance but also, model drugs representing various classes were chosen by the department to carry out research and projects in the area of conventional and novel drug delivery systems, biopharmaceutics and pharmacokinetic evaluation, bioavailability and bioequivalence testing, preformulation, formulation development and stability testing.

The department of pharmaceutics is one of the key departments of the Institute. It is equipped with state of the art facilities to undertake research in drug development and delivery. More recently, the department has initiated research on Biomaterials and Nanotechnology. In the frontier area of Biomaterial research, the focus will be for synthesis and characterization of new biodegradable polymer, their formulations for various drug delivery systems, to improve surface biocompatibility of medical devices and their invitro/invivo evaluation. To strengthen our research potential, nanotechnolgy will be utilized to prepare effective carriers to deliver the drugs at diseases targets and effort will be taken to initiate gene delivery program in our department.