A complete description of all undergraduate and professional education programs offered by the Purdue University School of Pharmacy are located elsewhere. At Purdue, the transition is nearing completion and the last students have been accepted into the BS in Pharmacy program. After 2000, students will be accepted only into the four-year professional curriculum leading to a Pharm. In order to provide students with the opportunity to develop a strong foundation on which to build these skills, the curriculum emphasizes six major areas of instruction.
Pharmaceutical chemistry emphasizes the application of chemical sciences to pharmacy.
Some of the courses deal with chemicals used as medicines - their use, nature, preparation and preservation. In other courses, attention is given to the processes and tests used to determine the purity and strength of a chemical or its pharmaceutical form. The pharmacy student learns, for example, how to find out if aspirin is pure, or how to determine how much vitamin C is contained in a particular solution or tablet. For example, with a drug such as quinine, this study involves the source, the commercial production, the marketing, the chief pure chemicals contained in the drug, and the uses made of the drug and its derivatives. Pharmacology is concerned with understanding the action of drugs in the body.