Figure 1: Core Concepts of Pharmacology Project Plan. The major outcomes of the project are shown on the left, and the columns indicate the stages involved in achieving those outcomes.
While depicted as linear, the process is iterative in nature. For example, the ’defining and unpacking’ phase of the core concept development stage resulted in the change of the core concept ‘drug-receptor interaction’ to ‘drug-target interaction’, and the change of the core concept ‘agonists and antagonists’ to sub-concepts of ‘drug-target interaction’. While the current framing of the project is ‘foundational principles’, we acknowledge there are many more layers to unpack as the knowledge base progresses into more complex pharmacology, potentially adding more sub-stages at each stage to explore advanced and threshold concepts in pharmacology.