Introduction

Abstract

Pharmacy has at its core the discipline of pharmaceutics, which is the study of drug formulations and the processes by which these are designed, manufactured and delivered to the body. In brief, the subject is about the conversion of drug substances into the medicines that patients can take or have administered to them. There are other vital component disciplines: the way drugs act in the body is the domain of pharmacology; the science of drug design and analysis is that of medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry. Of course, there should be no clear dividing line between these subject areas. One cannot design formulations without a comprehensive knowledge of the chemistry of the drug substance, nor study how medicines behave in the laboratory or in patients without good analytical methodology. An understanding of the pharmacology of a drug is crucial not only to the proper design of an optimal delivery system, but also to the practice of pharmacy. There is certainly no dividing line in the sciences underlying these subjects, and the physical chemistry that operates in the formulation laboratory is the same that holds within the human body. The forces acting between suspension particles and the walls of the container are the same as those acting on bacteria adsorbing on to a catheter or the intestinal wall.