The coronary circulation: How blood is supplied to the heart.

Blood circulation to the skin: How it warms you up and cools you down.

G protein coupled receptors: How they transduce extracellular signals into intracellular responses.

Voltage clamp and patch clamp electrophysiology methods for studying ion channels

What is the Nernst potential? A function of ion channels and ion concentration gradients.

What is a reporter gene assay and how does it work?

Vascular smooth muscle excitation-contraction coupling

What is a biased agonist in Pharmacology and how does it work?

What are spare receptors in Pharmacology? Their relationship to drug action.

How does digoxin help the heart? Mechanisms of cardiac glycoside action and toxicity.

The Vascular System. Blood vessels: structure and function of arteries, veins and capillaries.

Scintillation proximity assay. What it is, how it works and what it is used for.

Endothelium-dependent regulation of vascular tone. Effect of endothelium on vascular smooth muscle

Neural and humoral regulation of vascular tone

How are new drugs discovered? The discovery and development of new drugs to treat disease.

How do ACE inhibitors work? Mechanisms of action and comparison with ARBs.

Calcium channel blockers. Mechanisms of action and therapeutic uses of calcium antagonists.

What is a drug? and how does a drug work? Different types of agonist and antagonist

Cardiac, skeletal and smooth muscle contraction compared. How electrical signals cause contraction.

What is a beta blocker? Mechanism of action. How beta blockers help the heart to work.

What is a heart valve? How valves keep blood flowing in the right direction through the heart.

How does the heart beat? From the sinoatrial node to muscle contraction

What is an ECG (or EKG)? How an ECG is measured and what it records

Excitation-contraction coupling in the heart. How an electrical signal causes the heart to beat.

How to plot a dose response curve and measure EC50. Key concepts in pharmacology.

Specialised circulations (2)

Lead generation in drug discovery and development

Assay Techniques. Methods used in drug discovery

Molecular methods in drug discovery & development

Drug Targets and Target Discovery. The search for new drugs.

Specific and Non-specific Binding in a ligand binding assay. Drug discovery methods