The Master of Medical Science in Drug Development will be awarded to students who successfully complete the coursework identified below. The program consists of seven core and five elective courses, delivered mainly by distance learning with some on-campus workshops. It will be taken part time (six sessions) to complete. The elective courses shall be selected from those that are available in the particular session, provided pre-requisite and timetabling constraints are met. The program is designed for persons wishing to pursue careers that relate to the development and safe use of medicines. Career opportunities exist in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, government and in research institutions such as universities. Health care professionals interested in developing new medicines and improving the use of existing medicines will find the course of value. The extensive range of electives enables the candidate to specialist in particular areas such as the discovery of new medicines, regulatory affairs, clinical trials, market development, medical department administration, preclinical studies, etc.

The discovery, development and marketing of medicines has become a highly organised interdisciplinary team activity. Members of such teams need to be literate in all aspects of drug development ranging from procedures for identifying lead compounds through to the full development of the product including preclinical studies, clinical trials and the legal, regulatory and ethical issues relevant to marketing and on-going vigilance of the medicine. The aim of this course is to enable people working in the field of developing and using pharmaceutical substances to obtain such expertise by providing core and elective materials in a distance-learning format. Since interchange of ideas is an essential part of any educational activity, the course will include interactive assignments with specific tutors and group discussions where students come together for tutorials, workshops and practice sessions, and generally to interchange ideas.

The educational principle governing the program's teaching approach is to streamline the provision of information and to concentrate on application. Thus, students are issued with a manual for each course. The manual contains, typically, about 200-250 pages of lecture notes plus 200-250 pages of attachments from the literature (relevant chapters from textbooks, published papers, etc., Australian and overseas government regulatory and policy documents, etc.).

Below is a list of core and elective courses for the Master of Medical Science in Drug Development. Generally students must take all core courses and sufficient electives to give a total of 72 units of credit. The program proceeds in three stages, which correspond to Years 1 to 3 for students proceeding in the minimum time. In special cases, students may replace core courses with electives.

Year 1

Session 1

Session 2

Year 2

Session 1

Session 2
Core course PHPH9128 R & D, plus one Elective course (1 x 6 units of credit) chosen from the list below.

Year 3

Session 1

Session 2

Electives

Electives are chosen from the following:

Please refer to the Program Structure above and contact the school office for further information.

For information regarding fees for UNSW programs, please refer to the following website:  https://my.unsw.edu.au/student/fees/FeesMainPage.html