History of clinical pharmacology in Korea

Abstract

Rudolph Bucheim introduced the concept of optimum drug therapy and optimal use of drugs in the treatment of disease in 1849. However, clinical pharmacology as an academic discipline began after intensive researches into the appropriate use of antimalarial drugs during World War II. The word “Clinical Pharmacology” was first used in the title “Clinical Pharmacology Laboratory” led by Albert Sjoerdsma, with the support of James Shannon of the US National Heart Institute, in the early 1950s. There was also a clinical working group within the Department of Pharmacology at Cornell University College of Medicine led by Harry Gold and Walter Modell. In the US, during the 1950s and 1960s, clinical pharmacological research and programs fostering clinical pharmacologists expanded greatly, with the establishment of 10 clinical pharmacology centers within university hospitals supported by NIGMS. Simultaneously, in Western Europe, there was a rapidly growing need for collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and academia for the clinical development of new drugs, and clinical pharmacology was dawning as a discipline at Hammesmith Hospital and University College Hospital in the UK. The thalidomide tragedy in the late 1950s demonstrated the urgent need to develop clinical pharmacology departments in universities. In the 1960s, the Karolinska Institute of Sweden established a clinical pharmacology department in Huddinge Hospital, which became the epicenter of clinical pharmacology development throughout Western Europe. Among Asian countries, the pharmaceutical industry developed early only in Japan. The Japanese pharmaceutical industry developed new global drugs as early as the 1960s. Scholars who received clinical pharmacology training in Europe and the US during this period facilitated the establishment of clinical pharmacology programs in medical institutes from the late 1960s to the 1970s. However, despite the WHO’s endeavor to expand clinical pharmacology to other countries in the early 1970s, this did not extend to the Asian medical world beyond Japan. The notion of clinical pharmacology was first introduced in the Korean medical community in the early 1970s by professor KS Lee from SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York while he was working as a visiting professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Seoul National University (SNU) College of Medicine. Dr. YW Cho became the Chair of the Pharmacology Department of Chung-Ang University College of Medicine in 1974 after finishing fellowship training in clinical pharmacology in the US. Though he introduced clinical pharmacology to Korea and conducted clinical pharmacology studies, he did not make a large impact in academia. However, since then, more young pharmacologists and clinicians have begun to recognize the importance of clinical pharmacology in the development and optimal use of new and existing drugs.