Research

The task of experimental pharmacology is to elucidate the mechanism of action of pharmaceuticals, identify new therapeutic target structures and provide suitable biological measurement systems for testing new substances. University toxicology has the task of uncovering the harmful effects of drugs and foreign substances in the environment, identifying the mechanism of damage and developing strategies and recommendations for prevention. Pharmacology and toxicology are therefore interdisciplinary by nature and combine important contributions from a wide range of specialist disciplines. As with other biomedical disciplines, the boundaries between them are not intuitively clear-cut. Any attempt to define the discipline of pharmacology and toxicology must therefore be guided by the scientific objective - to understand how different active substances affect the living organism and how these effects can be harnessed as therapeutic principles - as there is no specific conceptual or technical coherence between the disciplines.