Medicinal Agents

Med Agents is the class that has the distinction of being one of the "major" classes I am taking that doesn't begin with "pharmaco-", including pharmacology, pharmacotherapy, and pharmacokinetics. The official description is more descriptive than most of my other courses, being described as "chemical/biological properties and therapeutic uses of drugs affecting central nervous, endocrine, and intermediary metabolism systems."

This course goes hand-in-hand with pharmacology. In pharmacology we learn the big-picture of what happens to the body when you take a drug, like what receptors are activated by a drug, what organ systems are have those receptors, and what the effect of activating those receptors is.

In med agents we learn more of the nitty-gritty detials of how the drug interacts with a receptor. For example, in the morphine molecule shown here, did you know if the top -OH molecule is changed to something else it won't work at all? If you change the top -OH to -OCH₃ it becomes codeine. And that's how codeine works in your body; it doesn't do anything until your body converts it into morphine through enzymes in your liver. The courses are taught in tandem. If you don't pay close attention to your schedule, you could show up all ready for a pharmacology lecture and get a med agents lecture.