Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences

The Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences,University of Shizuoka, traces its origin to the Shizuoka Prefectural College of Pharmacy, which was founded in 1953. Up to the present more than 1,000 M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees have been granted and their recipients are actively working in academics, at pharmaceutical companies, in governmental offices, in hospitals, and so on. The School educates pharmacists and scientists,advances scientific discovery, and conducts basic research in public health and welfare as a public graduate-level institution. The School trains graduate students to pursue new concepts and to think beyond the extent of their specific disciplines in order to become pharmacists and scientists. These specialists create new drugs, develop new analytical methods to determine the purity and quality of therapeutic agents, find better ways to deliver the drug to patients, minimize side effects, and assess the activity, stability, and toxicity of drug compounds as well as food and chemicals.

Recently, clinical pharmacy has emerged as a new field in pharmaceutical education and research.Pharmacists are increasingly involved as direct participants in the care of patients and as active members of the health care team. In this expanded health care role, pharmacists are becoming sources of drug information,consultants with physicians regarding the correct selection and usage of drugs for particular patients and are taking a more responsible role in advising the patient on how to self-administer medications correctly. In general, today’s pharmacists are also required to spend more time in promoting the personal health and welfare of patients. The School takes seriously its specific responsibilities to educate professional pharmacy students as compassionate, flexible leaders in the pharmaceutical care of individual patients, and as experts in the safe and optimally effective use of drug products for these patients. In 1996, the Departments of Pharmaco-Biochemistry, Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and the Laboratory for Social and Hospital Pharmaceutical Sciences were established. The Division of Clinical Pharmaceutical Sciences was initiated with new departments as well as the reorganization of the above units in 2002. This Division will open laboratories in Shizuoka General Hospital with which the University entered into an agreement in 2003.This partnership allows us to carry out our clinical curriculum as a combination of academic studies, residency in hospital pharmacy, and research.

Our program“Center of Excellence for Evolutionary Human Health Sciences”was selected by the Japanese government as a COE Program in the 2lst Century in 2002. The aim of this program is to collect and disseminate significant information for maintaining human health through research and education in the area of food and medicine in close collaboration with the Graduate Schools of Nutritional and Environmental Sciences in this university. In 2004, the Center for Drug Discovery was established in our Graduate School to create novel drugs in cooperation with the Fuji-Pharma Valley Initiative of Shizuoka Prefecture.