Rang & Dale’s Pharmacology 9th Edition

Book Name: Rang & Dale’s Pharmacology 9th Edition
Author: James Ritter, Rod Flower, Graeme Henderson, Yoon Kong Loke, David MacEwan, Humphrey Rang
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN-10, 13: 978-0702074486,0702074489
Year: 2019
Pages: 808 pages
Language: English
File size: 36 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

Rang & Dale’s Pharmacology 9th Edition Pdf Book Description:

In this edition, as in its predecessors, we set out to explain what drugs do in terms of the mechanisms by which they act. This entails analysis not only at the cellular and molecular level, where knowledge and techniques are advancing rapidly, but also at the level of physiological mechanisms and pathological disturbances. Pharmacology has its roots in therapeutics, where the aim is to ameliorate the effects of disease, so we have attempted to make the link between effects at the molecular and cellular level and the range of beneficial and adverse effects that humans experience when drugs are used for therapeutic or other reasons. Therapeutic agents have a high rate of obsolescence. In the decade 2008 to 2017, 301 new drugs gained regulatory approval for use as therapeutic agents. The majority exploit the same molecular targets as drugs already in use. Knowledge of the mechanisms of action of the class of drugs to which a new agent belongs provides a good starting point for understanding and using a new compound intelligently. Significantly, however, one-third of these new arrivals are ‘first-in-class’ drugs.

That is, they act on novel molecular targets not previously exploited for therapeutic purposes, and are therefore likely to produce effects not previously described. Not all will succeed clinically, but some will stimulate the development of improved follow-up compounds of the same type. Furthermore, about a quarter of the new compounds are ‘biopharmaceuticals’ mainly proteins produced by bioengineering rather than synthetic chemistry. These are growing in importance as therapeutic agents, and generally have characteristics somewhat different from conventional drugs and are covered in a revised chapter. The very high rate of innovation in drug discovery is a recent and very welcome change, due in large part to the rapid advances in molecular and cell biology that have stemmed from the sequencing of the human genome in 2003. We have tried to strike a balance between the need to keep up with these modern developments and the danger of information overload. Our emphasis is on explaining the general principles underlying drug action, which apply to old and new alike, and to describe in more detail the actions and mechanisms of familiar, established drugs, while including references that cover modern and future developments.