The Department of Pharmaceutics was established in 1951 as Japan’s first department of pharmaceutics. Since its establishment, the Department has conducted research on the design of methods and forms of drug administration with the aim of ensuring the efficacy, safety, and quality of drugs and contributing to the optimization of disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.
At the time of the establishment of the department, antibiotics and new sulfa drugs were introduced one after another, and the late Professor Kiichiro Kakemi, the first professor of the department, took up the problems of measuring their concentrations in body fluids and tracking their pharmacokinetics, which opened the door to pharmacodynamic research in Japan. He also conducted research on the coating of oral preparations, which became the foundation for research on the development of drug dosage forms in later years.
Thereafter, the idea of realizing more sophisticated drug therapy by integrating the “science of active pharmaceutical ingredients as objects” and the “science of administration methods” including dosage forms was born. Professor Hitoshi Sezaki, who assumed the position in 1971, set the research on drug delivery systems, a new form of drug administration, as the central theme of his department, and worked on the development of both the spread of the idea and the development of the technology to optimize drug therapy through the precise control of drug disposition.
The precise control of drug disposition is based on both the elucidation of the molecular mechanism of drug disposition in the body and the development of technologies to control the disposition. Under the leadership of Professor Mitsuru Hashida, who has presided over the department since 1992, various research projects are currently underway to open up the frontier of drug delivery system development, with the aim of establishing new methods for pharmacokinetic evaluation and analysis, developing new technologies that enable the control of drug disposition, and applying these technologies to future medical treatments such as gene therapy. Research is being promoted to open up the frontier of drug delivery system development.
The Department of Pharmacology was renamed the Department of Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics at the graduate school in 1993 with the establishment of an independent department, and was renamed the Department of Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics at the graduate school in 1997. The Department of Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics was renamed the Department of Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics at the graduate school in 1993. We aim to contribute to the development of pharmacology and medicine through active participation in these activities.
