B.Pharma is a four-year undergraduate degree offered by IIT BHU, Varanasi. Its admissions involve a two-step process, so the students need to qualify for JEE Mains and then take the JEE Advanced. The selection process is based on the JEE Advanced rank.
B.Pharma : A Brief Overview
The courses designed for B.Pharma are such that they impart knowledge on various aspects of drug design, development, testing, and safe and effective use of medicines including drug delivery systems. Primarily, they aim at creating a unique fusion of biology, engineering, and technological concepts, thus shedding light on techniques of designing, procuring and evaluating various kinds of drugs and drug delivery systems. Providing unique opportunities to pharmacy professionals, the subjects in the course prepare students to serve humanity and help alleviate the discomfort, pain, and suffering caused by various diseases.
Students can now change their IIT branch, thanks to the new rule introduced in 2014. Talking about the infrastructure and facilities, the B.Pharma IIT (BHU) department is well-funded because of its high number of PhD students. So, it is fully equipped with the latest technology and works well as a standalone division. It also organizes the biggest departmental fest of IIT BHU—SPIRIT.
Specializations : Department of Pharmaceutics
Pharmaceutical Chemistry
An amalgamation of basic chemistry and life sciences, this multi-disciplinary field deals with the principles and natural, synthetic, computational and analytical chemistry applications. It helps in the discovery of chemical therapeutics for the prevention and cure of life-threatening diseases. This is one of the major areas of drug discovery that caters to the increasing demand of new drug molecules for the effective medical practice against various diseases and disorders.
Pharmacognosy
It is a scientific study of crude drugs like plants, animals, microbes and minerals. The field includes quality control, standardization, isolation & characterization of phytoconstituents and formulation development. It dwells in the areas of isolation of phytoconstituents, formulation, development & standardization of herbal drugs and evaluation of biological activities of medicinal plants.
Pharmacology
It deals with the effect and fate of drugs in the biological system. Pharmacology is a multidisciplinary area, which requires expert knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathophysiology and clinical sciences. It provides a platform for establishing the therapeutic potential of new agents and formulations. The study is essential for the metamorphosis of compounds into drugs.
Pharmaceutics
Pharmaceutics is about the design and development of a suitable dosage form for a drug and strategies to deliver it to the desired part of the body. Stable, safe and effective pharmaceutical drug formulations, including modern nanoformulations, involve several unique strategies. Their main objective is to blend the components into a suitable pharmaceutical matrix, which on consumption, deliver the drug into the biological matrix.
Research Areas
The major areas of research are neuropharmacology & metabolic pharmacology, industrial pharmacognosy phytopharmaceutics, Ethnopharmacognosy, Phytochemistry, biological evaluation of medicinal plants, development and evaluation of drug formulations, rate controlled and targeted drug systems and nanoformulations. It also includes drug design, lead discovery and lead optimization from natural, semi-synthetic and synthetic sources, theoretical structural activity relationship studies, virtual docking and real time pharmacological evaluation of lead compounds against various drug targets, development, and validation of analytical methods for drugs and drug formulations, etc.
Placement Scenario
The undergraduate (B Pharm) students are placed through the Training & Placement Cell of IIT (BHU) in various companies such as Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Matrix Laboratories, United Health, Evaluserve, Cognizant, IBM, Wipro, Sony, Musigma, Headstrong, Zynga, Orbeas and Bank of India, etc. Some of the students also opt for higher studies (MS, M Pharm, MBA, PGDM, PhD) in India and abroad. Many are placed through off-campus selections.
IIT BHU is the first institution in the country to start the degree level pharmacy education and is the pioneering center for pharmacy education in the Asian, African and Far East region of the world. Students who have graduated from this department work in the US, Europe, UK, Malaysia and other countries
The pharmaceutical industry remains immune to all market fluctuations. It has a phenomenal growth rate of close to 14%, which makes it an excellent career choice. The curriculum provides a multi-disciplinary environment, which is necessary to learn various skills. Since IIT BHU is the only one providing courses in pharmaceutics, it has an edge over all other IIT branches in India.
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