KE538: Physical Chemistry for pharmacy

In order to achieve the purpose of the course, the learning objective of the course is that the student demonstrates the ability to:

Knowledge

After the course the students will be able to

• Understand and deduce the relationship between thermodynamic functions, their pressure, volume and temperature dependence
• Describe chemical systems, including phase diagrams and phase transitions, on a phenomenological level with the inclusion of experimental data and the theory described in the course
• Argue which physico-chemical factors that are important for the state and transformations of drug substances in the body, in the drug-formulation and production phase, as well as during storage and relate these factors to the theories presented in the course.

Skills

After the course, the student will;

• Be able to make relevant choices of laws and models that enable them to work with specific detailed issues within drug formulation and drug manufacturing as well as clinical pharmacy
• Be able to assess whether a system behaves ideally on the basis of experimental data (such as vapor pressure, pH, freezing point). Be able to use activity coefficients and osmotic coefficients to describe deviations from ideality and be able to calculate activity coefficients in ionic systems.
• Independently be able to link relevant literature data with the application of theory and laws in a task solution.
• Independently and safely be able to perform simple illustrative experiments that can visualize conditions of particular relevance to drug manufacturing (osmometry, surface tension and equilibrium constant temperature dependence).
• Be able to relate simple experiments and experimental data to the subject's theory, exercises and pharmaceutical problems.

Competences 

Through this course, the students will gain competencies from physical chemistry, which can be used for an increased insight and understanding of the physical chemical laws that have an impact on the pharmaceutical subjects. This includes drug formulation as well as drug manufacturing, understanding of the physiological processes and of drug transport and drug delivery.

• The main sentenses of chemical thermodynamics; Gibbs free energy, enthalpy and entropy
• Chemical potential and activity
  
• Ideal and non-ideal solutions
• Colligative properties
• Chemical equilibrium and phase diagrams of simple systems, phase transitions and their dependence on pressure and volume
• Chemical equilibrium with focus on acid-based equilibriums, monovalent and polyvalent acids and bases, ampholytes, degree of ionisation and buffer capacity, 
• Deviations from ideality, ionic solutions, Debey-Hückel theory
• Interfases, surface tension and critical micellar concentration
• Chemical reaction kinetics, reaction order, stability, chemical half life and shelf-life
  

At the faculty of science the teaching is planned after a three phase model, i.e. intro, training and the study phase;

• Intro phase (Lectures) - numbers of hours; 24
• Training phase - number of hours; 36, of these 24 hours class lessons and 12 hours of laboratory classes

Activities in the study phase

• individual study of the text book and other relevant literature
• assignments and laboratory reports
• continuous collection and work with the teaching material and topics of the course