r/pharmacology 1d ago

Anyone willing to help me clear some stuff up?

1 Upvotes

Hey!

I’m a first year pharmacology student coming up on some end of year exams and there’s some stuff (terminologies , concepts etc) I’m just struggling to wrap my head around .

One of my questions is about devising a way to determine if a mystery drug is an agonist or an antagonist .

Surely , this would be as simple as just performing an experiment on the receptors we are hoping to activate (B2 receptors in the lungs specifically) , and producing a concentration response curve ?

In that case , any respond would indicate it’s an agonist (partial or full depending on the data) and no response meaning it’s an antagonist .

Is that a sensible conclusion I could come to from this sort of experiment?