Pick A Drug

senordingdong

Have to write a pharmacology assignment on a drug of my choice, but I'm having trouble picking one.
Anybody any suggestions on what would be an interesting drug to write about, to which there is easy access to knowledge about it?

Ciaran500

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin

First one that I thought of and should get loads of info on it, not that interesting though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsd
If you want something more interesting.

wheresthebeef

pick Insulin. You could pick any from hundreds of insulin preparations, and how they are manufactured in bacterial cells, and look at their mode of action within the body.

god i love diabetes care.

caff

morphine or asperin

insteresting history

senordingdong

Well I'm not really looking for much on history, more about absorption and metabolism etc...

Also, I don't want my teachers to think I'm a drugie.

matc66

I would agree with morphine and aspirin. But if you're looking at all that pharmacokinetics stuff then phenytoin.
It has this zero order kinetics that makes it difficult to predict drug levels at any given time, so toxicity can easily occur.
Then the opioid family all have interesting metabolism with some of them being very lipophilic so may have short half-lives but their volume of distribution is huge leading to long elimination half-lives. e.g. fentanyl, remifenatanil.
Oh and pethidine the first synthetic opioid, developed as an anti-convulsant I think and then discovered to have analgesic properties. It has interesting interactions with MAOIs as shown on ER once, called meperidine in the US.

As a matter of curiosity!Whar is pharmacology like?Im doing it next year!

John

Fluoxetine (Prozac)

DrIndy

Pick a statin like rosuvastatin, there's recent new and very exciting evidence that they immunomodulate as well as reduce cholesterol and stabilise plaques in arteries and can even make them regress.

There is also new and exciting info that the immunomodulation can be harnessed to treat autoimmune diseases like MS.

senordingdong

Thanks Doc, but I'm already doing another assignemnt on DMARDs so I can't overlap them.

Basically I've been looking for a drug that it is interesting to write and read about. But I need specific details on the drugs absorption, dstribution, metabolism and emlimination...this is making it difficult to find an interesting one.
Might anybody know of some good sources of this type of info online?

John

I don't really look stuff up online for pharmacology, I normally work from Pharmacology by Rang and Dale or Molecular Neuropharmacology by Nestler and then supplement with the mighty PubMed.

sportswear

digoxen.


my favourite

or something revolutionary like cyclopsorin.

Pet

*Cyclosporine.

You could also write about methylphenidate (Ritalin), as it's quite topical.

DrIndy

I'm no pharmacologist but of note which gives me a pain in the ass managing because of the above are a few examples:

Phenytoin - abnormal therapeutic dose level, interactions.
Warfarin - interacts with everything.
Lithium - different preparations, different metabolisms
Paracetamol! relative complex metabolism!!

If you are well and truly stuck, ask a pharmacologist - try a PhD student....

Go for Rang and Dale for information - it has the detail withour being boring - or ideally for clinical pharmacology - www.bnf.org - free registration and no spam.

DrIndy

sportswear wrote:

or something revolutionary like cyclopsorin.

Its not really all that revolutionary - whats revolutionary is molecular pharmacology and monoclonal antibodies.

Tree

warfarin - rat poison

senordingdong

I ended up resorting to Aspirin. There's enough crap about it easily available to get an entire assignment done.
Thansk for the suggestions everyone.