BSc Pharmacology
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UCAS code
B210 -
A level offer
BBB -
Year of entry
2025/26 -
Course duration
Full Time: 3 Years
-
Year of entry
2025/26 -
Course duration
Full Time: 3 Years
Develop the knowledge and skills to work as a pharmacologist within the pharmaceutical or life sciences industries with our new BSc Pharmacology.
This course has been designed to align with the British Pharmacological Society's core curricula and was developed with the needs of the pharmaceutical industry in mind.
You will:
- Study the principles of drug action and molecular targets.
- Learn about drug design and delivery.
- Learn the key mathematical principles and skills required in the industry. This includes statistical analysis as well as handling and analysing big data sets.
- Understand the role of pharmacology in marketing, registration and clinical trials of medicines.
You'll work with academics across our Chemistry, Food and Pharmacy, Biological Sciences, and Mathematical, Physical and Computation Sciences schools.
Reading is one of the UK's top 10 universities for pharmacy and pharmacology (Daily Mail University Guide, 2025), and we have experts in pharmacology, pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy practice, as well as biomedical science and mathematics, who are all working on different aspects of drug research. In the National Student Survey 2024, 92% of our Pharmacy students said teaching staff are good at explaining things (92.13% of responders from the School of Pharmacy).
On this course you will also have the option of spending a year in industry with our four-year BSc Pharmacology with a Year in Industry.
Facilities
During your studies, you'll use our purpose-built suite of teaching laboratories and have access to our research facility. These include:
- Laboratories to study organ bath pharmacology
- tissue culture suites
- multi-mode microplate readers (absorbance, fluorescence, luminescence)
- multicolour flow cytometry
- real-time PCR.
You'll also study in our new £60m Health and Life Sciences Building, which offers state-of-the-art research and teaching laboratories, seminar rooms, and plenty of study and social space.
MPharm
Our BSc Pharmacology course will not result in qualification to work as a pharmacist. Please refer to our MPharm Pharmacy or MPharm Pharmacy with Preparatory Year courses if this is the route you wish to follow.