What Is Pharmacy? Profession and Research

Pharmacy is the health profession responsible for the safe and effective use of medicines, and also the name for a cluster of pharmaceutical sciences concerned with how drug products are designed, made, delivered and used. The word covers two things that are easy to run together: a clinical and regulated profession (pharmacists, who dispense, counsel and manage medication therapy) and an academic and industrial research enterprise (pharmaceutics, medicinal chemistry, pharmacy practice research and related fields) that generates the knowledge the profession and the drug industry rely on. This guide explains both halves, how pharmacy differs from pharmacology, how the field is trained and accredited, who funds its research, and where pharmacy intersects with research administration, especially through the research pharmacy that supports clinical trials.

Pharmacy in one paragraph

In everyday use, “pharmacy” is the place where prescriptions are filled and the profession of the people who work there. In an academic setting it is also a discipline: a college or school of pharmacy teaches the professional degree and houses faculty who do research in several distinct areas. The unifying thread is the medicine itself as a product and as a therapy. Where pharmacology asks how a drug acts on the body and how the body handles it, pharmacy asks how that drug becomes a usable, stable, correctly dosed product, how it reaches the right patient safely, and whether it actually works well in the people who take it.

Pharmacy versus pharmacology

These two terms are the most commonly confused in the field, and the distinction matters for choosing a degree, a journal, a funder or a career.

Pharmacology is a basic and translational biomedical science. It studies drug mechanisms, dose–response relationships, and the absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion of drugs. Its training track is typically a research doctorate. See CASRAI’s What Is Pharmacology? guide.
Pharmacy is a health profession plus an applied group of sciences. It deals with drug products (formulation, manufacture, quality), with medication use in patients (dispensing, monitoring, counseling, safety) and with the organization and economics of pharmaceutical care. In the United States the entry-level professional credential is the Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD), a clinical professional degree.

The fields overlap heavily. A pharmaceutical scientist studying how a tablet dissolves uses pharmacokinetic ideas that come from pharmacology; a clinical pharmacologist and a clinical pharmacist may sit on the same committee. A useful shorthand is that pharmacology explains what a drug does, while pharmacy makes the drug into a medicine and puts it to responsible use. Toxicology, which asks the harm-focused version of the pharmacology question, is covered in What Is Toxicology?.

The profession: what pharmacists do

Pharmacists work across several settings, and the work differs substantially between them:

Community and ambulatory practice — dispensing, counseling patients, managing chronic-disease medication therapy, and providing some additional services depending on the jurisdiction.
Hospital and health-system practice — preparing and verifying inpatient medication orders, sterile compounding, formulary decisions, and medication-safety programs. Governance structures such as the committee described in Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee Charter and processes such as hospital formulary management are where pharmacy practice and institutional administration meet.
Clinical pharmacy — pharmacists embedded in care teams who optimize medication regimens for individual patients, often in specialties such as oncology, infectious disease or critical care.
Industry — formulation, manufacturing and quality, regulatory affairs, medical affairs and pharmacovigilance. See Regulatory Affairs in the Pharmaceutical Industry.
Research and academia — faculty teaching in colleges of pharmacy, and pharmacists supporting clinical research (see the research pharmacy section below).

The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) describes pharmacy as the third largest health profession in the United States, with over 300,000 practitioners working across a variety of healthcare settings. Pharmacy practice is regulated at the jurisdiction level, so licensing rules, scope of practice and permitted services vary by state and by country; always check the current rules of the relevant licensing authority rather than assuming the practice described for one place applies to another.

The pharmaceutical sciences: major research fields

Pharmacy schools and pharmaceutical-science departments typically organize research into several areas. The boundaries are porous, and many investigators work across two or three.

Pharmaceutics and drug delivery

Pharmaceutics is the science of turning an active ingredient into a dosage form that can be manufactured, stored, administered and absorbed reliably. It covers preformulation (the physical and chemical properties of a compound), formulation design (tablets, injectables, inhalers, topical products, long-acting and targeted delivery systems), biopharmaceutics (how formulation affects absorption and bioavailability) and stability. Concepts such as the biopharmaceutics classification of a drug substance are central here; see The Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS). Pharmaceutics also connects to pharmacometrics, the quantitative modeling of drug exposure and response.

Medicinal chemistry

Medicinal chemistry designs and optimizes drug-like molecules: relating chemical structure to biological activity, improving potency and selectivity, and managing properties that determine whether a compound can become a medicine. It sits upstream of pharmacology, which characterizes the biology of the resulting compounds, and it draws on organic synthesis and, increasingly, computation. See What Is Cheminformatics? for the data and modeling side, and What Is Biochemistry? for the molecular background.

Pharmacognosy and natural products

Pharmacognosy studies medicinal substances derived from plants, microbes and other natural sources, including isolation, characterization and the investigation of biological activity. It is a historic root of the discipline and remains an active source of lead compounds.

Pharmacy practice and clinical pharmacy research

This area studies how medicines are used in real care and how pharmacist services change outcomes. Typical questions include whether a pharmacist-led intervention improves medication adherence, how to reduce medication errors, how to detect adverse drug events, and how to design safe medication-use processes. Practice research often takes the form of quality improvement, implementation studies, cohort studies and pragmatic trials. Examples of the process work on this site include Medication Use Evaluation and ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices.

Pharmacoepidemiology, outcomes research and pharmacoeconomics

These population-level fields use large healthcare datasets and study designs to examine drug utilization, safety signals, comparative effectiveness and cost. They share methods with epidemiology and with health services research.

Social and administrative pharmacy

Social and administrative pharmacy applies social-science and management methods to medication use and to pharmacy as an organization: access to medicines, health policy, supply-chain integrity (for instance the framework summarized in DSCSA: What the Drug Supply Chain Security Act Requires), professional behavior and workforce studies.

Pharmaceutical analysis, quality and regulatory science

This area develops and validates the analytical methods that confirm identity, strength, purity and stability, and studies the regulatory frameworks that govern drug products. It is closely tied to good manufacturing practice and to the work of regulatory affairs professionals.

Research methods in pharmacy

Because the field spans bench science and clinical care, its methods are unusually varied:

Laboratory and analytical methods — dissolution testing, chromatography and mass spectrometry for quantifying drugs and impurities, solid-state characterization, permeability and stability studies.
Computational methods — molecular modeling, quantitative structure–activity relationships, and pharmacokinetic modeling and simulation.
Observational designs — cohort and case–control studies using claims, registry or health-record data to study medication use and outcomes.
Interventional and pragmatic designs — randomized and cluster-randomized trials of pharmacist-delivered services, and quality-improvement studies in practice settings.
Qualitative and mixed methods — interviews and surveys on patient experience, prescriber behavior and implementation barriers.
Clinical trial conduct — supporting investigational products under the framework of Good Clinical Practice.

Research pharmacy and the Investigational Drug Service

The point where pharmacy most directly meets research administration is the research pharmacy, often called an Investigational Drug Service (IDS). It is the pharmacy function that receives, stores, prepares, dispenses, accounts for and returns or destroys investigational products in clinical trials. In a blinded study, a designated pharmacist may hold the randomization information so that the treating team and outcome assessors remain unaware of assignment. Because the pharmacy controls the product chain of custody, it is a central part of a site’s compliance with Good Clinical Practice.

CASRAI covers this territory in depth:

For research administrators, the practical implications are budgeting for pharmacy preparation and handling effort, ensuring the pharmacy is involved in study feasibility and start-up, and making sure delegation, training and temperature and accountability records are in order before the first participant is enrolled. The broader operational picture is in Clinical Research Management.

Training, accreditation and credentials

In the United States, the professional pathway runs through a Doctor of Pharmacy program followed by licensure by the relevant state board. Many graduates who want advanced clinical or research skills pursue postgraduate residency or fellowship training. Researchers in the pharmaceutical sciences more often hold a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences, medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutics or a related subject, and some hold both a PharmD and a PhD.

ACPE accreditation. The Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) is the accrediting body for professional pharmacy education in the United States. Its website lists the types of program it accredits: Doctor of Pharmacy programs in the United States, continuing education providers, continuing professional development programs, international pharmacy degree programs outside the United States, and pharmacy technician education programs in collaboration with ASHP. ACPE states that its mission is to assure the quality of pharmacy education and training and to support the advancement of the pharmacy profession. Its current standards for PharmD programs are the ACPE Standards 2025, effective July 1, 2025, with the earlier Standards 2016 retained as legacy documentation. ACPE describes accreditation as public recognition that a professional degree program leading to the Doctor of Pharmacy degree has been judged to meet established qualifications and education standards through initial and periodic evaluation. For anyone choosing a program, whether a school holds current ACPE accreditation status is a standard check.

Professional societies and journals

American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) — describes itself as the national organization representing pharmacy education in the United States, established in 1900. Its stated mission is to advance pharmacy education, research, scholarship, practice and service. It serves faculty, administrators, researchers, residents, fellows and students, and publishes the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education (AJPE) along with the news publication Academic Pharmacy Now; it also offers searchable directories for faculty and grants.
American Pharmacists Association (APhA) — describes itself as the voice of pharmacy and serves pharmacists, student pharmacists and pharmacy technicians across practice settings. Its listed publications include the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association (JAPhA), JAPhA Practice Innovation, Pharmacy Today and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
American College of Clinical Pharmacy (ACCP) — a professional and scientific society focused on clinical pharmacy, the discipline of pharmacists providing direct patient-care medication management. (Its website could not be retrieved for this guide, so check its own pages for current programs, journals and membership details.)
American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) — the society behind widely used guidance on managing investigational drug products in health systems and a collaborator with ACPE on technician education.

Outside the United States, national pharmaceutical societies and regulators play parallel roles, and titles and entry routes differ by country.

How pharmacy research is funded

Funding depends on the subfield:

Basic and pharmaceutical-science research — in the United States, much of it is supported through the National Institutes of Health. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) lists “Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biological Chemistry” among its areas of research, making it a natural home for foundational drug-related work that is not tied to a single disease. Disease-focused institutes fund pharmaceutical research relevant to their remit.
Pharmacy practice, outcomes and health services research — supported by federal health services research programs, patient-centered outcomes funders, health systems, professional associations and foundations. Priorities change, so verify each program’s current announcements.
Industry — pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies fund a large share of formulation, analytical and clinical work, including investigator-initiated studies. Industry sponsorship carries its own disclosure and conflict-of-interest norms.
Professional-association and foundation grants — modest awards from pharmacy organizations, often aimed at early-career investigators and practice-based projects. The AACP site, for example, offers a searchable grants directory for members.

Pharmacy faculty and pharmacist investigators applying for grants face the same administrative requirements as any investigator: institutional routing, budgets, effort commitments, human-subjects review where patients are involved, and data management plans. The funding-specific details belong in the relevant CASRAI grants-management guides rather than here.

Where pharmacy research meets research administration

Research administrators encounter pharmacy in four recurring ways. First, the investigational drug supply chain: receipt, storage, dispensing and accountability, handled by the research pharmacy. Second, institutional medication governance, where a Pharmacy and Therapeutics committee and the formulary determine which products a hospital stocks, which can intersect with trial products. Third, quality and safety studies that begin as practice improvement and may later need to be assessed for human-subjects review. Fourth, regulatory work on drug products, where pharmacy-trained staff contribute to submissions and compliance. The shared reference points include the Good Clinical Practice framework and the methods discussed across the Research Methods hub.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between pharmacy and pharmacology?

Pharmacology is the biomedical science of how drugs act on the body and how the body handles them. Pharmacy is the health profession and set of applied sciences concerned with drug products and their safe, effective use. A pharmacologist typically trains through a research doctorate; a pharmacist in the United States earns a PharmD and a license. The two share a knowledge base.

What are the pharmaceutical sciences?

The pharmaceutical sciences are the research disciplines behind drug products and their use: pharmaceutics and drug delivery, medicinal chemistry, pharmacognosy, pharmaceutical analysis, pharmacokinetics and related modeling, and the population and social sciences of medication use such as pharmacoepidemiology and social and administrative pharmacy.

What does a pharmacist do in a clinical trial?

In a trial, a pharmacist in the research pharmacy or Investigational Drug Service typically receives and stores the investigational product, prepares and dispenses it according to the protocol, keeps accountability records, manages blinding where applicable, and handles return or destruction. See the research pharmacy guide and the research pharmacy SOP guide.

What does ACPE accreditation mean?

ACPE accreditation is public recognition that a professional degree program leading to the Doctor of Pharmacy degree has been judged to meet established qualifications and education standards through initial and periodic evaluation. ACPE also accredits continuing education providers and certain other programs.

Do you need a PhD to do pharmacy research?

Not always. Laboratory-based pharmaceutical science usually calls for a research doctorate, but pharmacy practice research is often led by pharmacists with a PharmD, frequently with additional residency, fellowship or a research degree. Some investigators hold both degrees.

Is pharmacy a science or a profession?

Both. It is a regulated health profession and also an academic field with its own research areas. That dual identity is why the same word can refer to a pharmacist behind a counter, a formulation scientist in a lab, or a health-services researcher studying medication use.

What Is Pharmacy? The Profession and Its Research Fields